Buying a house is never a simple thing for young people. Taking Xiao Lei as an example, for ordinary workers like us who are wandering in big cities, buying a house in the city without relying on the "financial support" of the family can be said to be more difficult than winning the lottery, and renting a house has become the only choice at this stage. However, as the social software says, "the house is rented, life is their own", in order to make the rented house look like a little bit of life, more and more young people choose to buy all kinds of small appliances for their small "home".
There is Xiao Lei, a group with high consumption desire and low consumption power who "can't keep money in his hands" and "has money to spend in this day", and witty merchants will certainly not let go of this market. So this year, whether it is on the e-commerce platform or on social media, we can see more and more small household appliances. Some of them occupy the signature advertising space of the e-commerce platform, and some are hidden in the photos and videos shared by the bloggers of Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
These small appliances have different functions, and some of them even seem a little weird - such as an oven that can be used to incubate chicks, but they invariably use fresh filters to sell potential buyers a vision of a better life, as if you can live a good new life like a video blogger after buying it.
But then again, are these appliances really useful? Or to put it another way, can these small appliances really change the lives of users?
According to the data rankings released by second-hand trading websites, the changes of small household appliances to daily life seem to be in a fight with 5G networks.
In the list of "Top Ten Useless Commodities in 2021", Idle Fish listed "Useless Commodities of the Year" according to the keywords of second-hand eating ash, in which popular small household appliances such as air fryers, treadmills, curling sticks, breakfast machines, and wall breakers were all on the list. Although the way and algorithm of idle fish sorting out the list may not necessarily reflect the real performance of these small household appliances, from the perspective of "eating ash rate", this list can still explain the problem.
So are small appliances really IQ tax?
"Small appliances" is "IQ tax"?
Calling all small household appliances an IQ tax in general is indeed a bit extreme in Xiao Lei's view. However, looking at the product descriptions of these famous ash-eating small household appliances on the list, it is not difficult for us to find the reasons why these household appliances eat ash - the reason why small household appliances "eat ash" is nothing more than two reasons:
There is a need for fabrication out of nothing;
Simple problems are complicated.
Let's analyze the first case first, and the top of the list of "Top Ten Useless Commodities in 2021", the air fryer, is the best example of something out of nothing.
Note that I don't mean to say that air fryers are "in vain demand", but for users with actual cooking scenes, air fryers can really enrich their own means of making fried things and the final taste. But at this stage, the vast majority of video bloggers who carry goods for air fryers do indeed package products that users do not need into daily necessities and let users pay for it.
First of all, the capacity of the air fryer is generally not large, although the working principle is a little similar to the electric oven, but the volume limits the other use scenarios of the air fryer, which can only be used for small amounts of baking. In addition, unlike the ten fingers that do not stick to the spring water of the sun and rely on the hungry young people to imagine, the air fryer also needs traditional kitchen ingredients, and after use, it is also necessary to clean the design of the complex hanging basket by yourself. From the description, the complexity of cleaning is undoubtedly the most important reason for the air fryer to eat ash.
The best example of a simple problem complication is undoubtedly the breakfast machine. In sharing, the breakfast machine can make a variety of different breakfasts at once, and it is easy to cook porridge while cooking porridge while baking sandwiches with a baking sheet, which is simply a model of saving time and effort. Like all small appliances aimed at culinary novices, manufacturers often like to complicate simple problems and emphasize that this highly integrated all-in-one device is the really simple and convenient choice.
But even if we put aside the steps of preparing materials and cleaning for the time being, as far as breakfast is concerned, an induction cooker and a most basic pan can complete most of the operations of the breakfast machine, and even more convenient to perform.
Although small kitchen appliances have become regular customers in eating gray lists, in fact, there are still many small household appliances in life that can be explained by the two situations just mentioned. In this case, the relationship between small household appliances and "IQ tax" is also clear at a glance, for those small household appliances sold to the wrong user group, calling it IQ tax seems to be a bit excessive, these products are not wrong, but do not meet the actual needs of users. But those products that increase demand and complicate simple problems do have a little "IQ tax" in Xiao Lei's personal view.
Or is it a consumerist trap at the end of the day?
In fact, from the perspective of products, the so-called "IQ tax" products are actually the manufacturer's miscalculation of user needs. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, a long period of home life has made young people have to focus on the rental houses and dormitories that are opposite to themselves but do not belong to themselves, and also promote the rapid growth of the small household appliance market, in early 2020, emerging companies focusing on small household appliances once outperformed the A-share market, which is enough to reflect the attractiveness of small household appliances to consumers at that time.
However, the increase in the participation of small household appliances market has also opened up competition in the small household appliance market, and small household appliances, as the "fast-selling products" in home appliances, have also appeared the same brand differentiation as fast-selling clothing:
Brands without R& D strength fight price wars by compressing manufacturing costs, while brands with R&D capabilities begin to quickly find, or even "fabricate" user needs, and put corresponding products on the market in a very short period of time, thereby seizing the market segment of small household appliances. Some of these rapidly launched products hit the real pain points of consumers, became market hits, and were quickly borrowed by other brands; some missed all the needs of consumers perfectly, and naturally became "IQ tax".
The rise of consumerism and the improvement of purchasing power make more and more young people hastily make purchase decisions, fueled by merchants and bloggers, more and more small household appliances that are not needed are purchased by young people who have no clue, and the end of these home appliances is naturally to become the "IQ tax" on second-hand platforms.
Although the so-called IQ tax in the small household appliance market is to a large extent a concrete manifestation of consumerism, from another point of view, the IQ tax on small household appliances actually means that the small household appliance market has transformed from traditional functional consumption to a compound consumption with a "life attitude" or "LifeStyle". Users buy small household appliances no longer for use, but the pursuit of the "spiritual pursuit" behind small household appliances, such as buying juicers, wall breakers is a symbol of their own "healthy life", although this juicer is their own stay up at 0 o'clock to buy.
In the face of market transformation, we as a single consumer can not do much, brands will not change their product strategies and layouts in order to take care of the ideas of any single consumer. But as consumers, we actually have ways to find the initiative in the trap of consumerism. One of the simplest ways is to summarize it in just one sentence: if you are hesitant to need a small appliance, you don't need it.