Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly Wei Yining
Editor/Letter of Song
Net red shop, no one queues
On the afternoon of one weekday at the end of March, Li Dan came to the basement floor of Hopson Hui Shopping Center in Chaoyang District, Beijing, and wanted to buy Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau's explosive product, Mo Potato.
In December last year, the Internet celebrity brand Mo mo dim sum bureau from Changsha opened its first store in Beijing's Xidan Joy City, and the scene was very hot, with the longest queue time of 7.5 hours on the day. More than three months have passed, and now Li Dan is surprised to find that the Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau has almost no need to queue. Although Hopson Hui is one of the most popular shopping malls in Beijing's East Fourth Ring Road, the Mo Mo Dim Sum Branch here is a bit deserted, with fewer than 10 people queuing.
After Li Dan bought two mochi, she sat nearby while resting and eating, she found that sometimes there was almost no one in line in the store, and she could buy it when she walked to the counter, and at most, the queue never exceeded 15 people, and the queue time was about 10 minutes, which was completely different from the "one-hour queue" she saw on the Public Comments, Little Red Book and other Apps.
Next to the Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau is another new tea drinking internet celebrity shop, a store of Lele Tea. Li Dan noticed that around 4 p.m., only five or six consumers were waiting at the scene. In front of the cabinet next to the tea, there is no one in line to buy it at any time.
Chu Yang, who works in Beijing's CBD, also found that the number of queues for new-style tea drinks has become smaller and smaller recently, and she had heard that the queue for Xi tea would take several hours, and when the soft European package of Lele Tea was limited to purchase, the soft European bag that wanted to gather all flavors would also be queued for nearly two hours. But now, the queue time of Lele Tea International Trade Store, Xicha Fortune Center Store, and Xicha Zhonghai Square Store generally does not exceed 15 minutes, and there are only 6-8 drinks in front, "I didn't expect the queue time to be so short."
In addition to baking products and new tea drinks, the original internet celebrity restaurants, which used to be known for their queues, have also stepped down from the altar.
Zhou Chen has worked in Beijing for more than a decade, and he has witnessed the time queuing for green tea restaurants getting shorter and shorter. Ten years ago, the queue time of the Green Tea Chaoyang Joy City store could reach an hour at night, but the night before the Qingming Festival holiday this year, Zhou Chen's department temporarily decided to have a dinner, and they easily booked a private room for ten people in the Green Tea Fortune Center store.
A green tea restaurant store in Beijing Photo by Caijing Tianxia Weekly
Haidilao, which is also the original internet celebrity restaurant, is the same, many consumers have had the experience of waiting for an hour or even longer in order to eat a haidilao meal, but Wu Xiaoyun from Changchun told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that some of Haidilao's newly opened stores in Changchun almost do not need to queue, and it is much easier to get nail art and hand care before booking.
Queuing was once a standard feature of internet celebrity restaurants. Over the years, in order to punch in the net red shop, young people do not hesitate to wait in line for hundreds of tables, two or three hours, just to taste the food, by the way, punch in to take photos, send a circle of friends.
Consumer Reports launched a survey on influencer shops in May 2021 and collected 1,162 valid questionnaires, of which nearly 90% of respondents were under the age of 35. The survey results show that more than 80% of respondents are willing to queue up in order to punch in the net red shop, and nearly half of the respondents are willing to queue for half an hour or more.
The popularity of the online red shop queue shows that its popularity is quite strong, and it is the time when consumers are flocking to it. Nowadays, when there is no longer a queue at the door of some internet celebrity shops, it is actually a sign that they are beginning to decline.
The hotter the queue, the higher the popularity
In 2011, there was an article circulating on the Internet "Human Beings Can No Longer Stop Haidilao", which told about Haidilao's gifts, accompaniment chats, nail art, putting a doll for customers who eat alone to "accompany food" and other creative intimate services, with the rise of the mobile Internet, this article continued to spread on platforms such as QQ space and WeChat circle of friends.
At that time, Haidilao only existed in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Shenyang and other first- and second-tier cities, and many hot pot lovers in small and medium-sized cities could not seek Haidilao, and many people could only experience Haidilao once when traveling.
In 2011, Liu Ya of Changchun was in high school, and until she went to college, Haidilao did not open a store in Changchun. At the end of 2015, she and her classmates went to Shenyang for a tour, in order to let the Haidilao clerk take a doll to accompany her to dinner, she deliberately separated from her classmates and went to the Haidilao store in Shenyang alone. In order to avoid queuing, she went to the door to "crouch" before Haidilao opened for business at 10:30 in the morning. After entering the restaurant, the waiter brought her a bear, she took a photo and sent a circle of friends to punch: "Finally there is a bear to accompany me to dinner." ”
The spread of word of mouth in the first generation of internet red restaurants like Haidilao has made the catering industry realize that the essence of the Internet economy is the eyeball economy, and the accumulation of word of mouth through the Internet allows consumers to have curiosity and herd psychology, which can quickly increase customer flow. Therefore, after 2015, countless catering practitioners want to label their stores as "internet celebrities", and all kinds of internet red restaurants and internet red milk tea shops have appeared rapidly.
A big label that accompanies these popular restaurants is queues.
In 2016, "Huangcha", which had been in business for five years, changed its name to "Heytea HEYTEA", successfully registered its trademark and obtained its first financing, and began to prepare to go out of the Pearl River Delta and expand to other regions. After the Spring Festival in 2017, Heytea opened its first store in Shanghai, with a long queue time of 6 hours and more than 4,000 cups sold every day. The queue has stimulated an unprecedented herd effect, making consumers full of expectations for Xicha.
As consumers scramble to post photos of fruit tea covered with a layer of cheese on social platforms such as circle of friends and Weibo, the name of Xicha has spread virally on social media, and every time it enters a new city, it will set off a wave of queues. In July 2017, when Xicha opened its first store at the same time in Sanlitun Taikoo Li and Chaoyang Joy City in Beijing, the scene was crowded, and the queue of Joy City even lined up at the door of the starbucks next to it.
In 2018, Ye Xi and his roommate, who were studying at a university in Beijing, visited a shopping mall in Beijing's Haidian District and came across Xicha by chance. Although the number of customers at heytea at that time was much smaller than when it first opened, it still had to queue for more than half an hour. Ye Xi asked his friend to line up for him, and went to help his friend buy food, and when he returned, he saw that his friend was still in line. They waited for about ten minutes before they drank the first cup of hi tea in their lives, "very excited." ”
The popularity of Xicha has been questioned about hiring people to queue up, but its founder Nie Yunchen has always held a negative attitude towards this, and industry insiders have also confirmed the innocence of Xicha through research visits. Zhu Danpeng, an analyst in the Chinese food industry, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly: "We have conducted market research visits in recent years, including store spot checks, street visits, etc., and have not found that there is a phenomenon of hiring people to queue up for Heytea. ”
In fact, in the heyday of Xicha, it was not the brand side that hired people to queue up, but the consumers. Joining the queue army, there are many "scalpers" who do the queue to buy on behalf of the business. Professional scalper Yang Xi told the "Finance and Economics World" weekly that in 2018 he received a lot of orders for Pai Xi tea, in Beijing Sanlitun store, he queued for two or three hours, charging 80-100 yuan, equivalent to the price of two to three cups of Xi tea drinks, "Many people want to drink Xi tea, but do not want to queue, will increase the price to find someone to buy, we buy after sending them over." ”
After Xi tea, Naixue's tea, Lele tea and other new tea brands have risen, although Lele Tea's "tea + soft European bag" model is highly homogeneous with Naixue, but Lele Tea once imposed a purchase restriction on soft European bags in 2017, and hunger marketing led to queuing. According to consumers at the time, in the online media, if they wanted to buy six kinds of soft European bags, they needed two people to queue up for more than an hour at the same time.
After 2020, new baking brands such as Mo mo dim sum bureau, Hu tou bureau standard beaten cake shop, Luxi River and so on began to seize the market, and when mo mo dim sum bureau and Hu tou bureau standard hit cake shop just entered Beijing, the queue time reached several hours. LuxiHe, which started in Nanjing, is "open a city, fire a city", in the Luxihe store outside Nanjing, there are always more than a dozen people queuing at the door.
In Changsha, queuing is the norm for catering, due to the small size of Changsha city, short commuting time, relatively slow pace of life, young people like to shop around, there is also time to queue, "queuing culture" has a deep foundation. Coupled with local tourism characteristics and media publicity, the symbol of Changsha's "City of Internet Celebrities" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and countless Internet celebrity brands have risen in Changsha, and queuing has become the label of these Internet celebrity shops: the more popular the queue, the higher the popularity.
Hire people to line up for the inside scoop
Compared with well-known brands that rely on online marketing to accumulate real popularity, small and medium-sized restaurants are more likely to directly hire people to queue up and create Internet celebrity stores.
In 2017, many media broke the news one after another that internet celebrity shops in first- and second-tier cities such as Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Changsha had hired "trust" queues to create the illusion that the stores were popular and attract more consumers.
In 2018, the reporter of Sanxiang Metropolis Daily went undercover to Changsha's "part-time group" and unveiled the inside story of the catering industry's hiring queue: human resources companies negotiated fees with merchants, provided employment information to scalpers, and scalpers sent part-time messages to part-time groups, earning the difference through layers of subcontracting. Most of the people who take orders are college students, who earn a little pocket money by being hired to queue up to rub free milk tea and free snacks.
Once the queue is exposed, the brand reputation will be greatly affected, and it will also involve false publicity and be punished by the regulatory authorities. Therefore, well-known brands pay more attention to real popularity than small shops, and the way they take is not to directly hire people to queue, but to attract customers through online publicity, discount activities, and then create a sense of hunger through limited supply, so that consumers really queue.
In terms of online and offline marketing, the net red shops from Changsha have achieved the ultimate, attracting customers by reducing unit prices and promotional activities. Cha Yan Yue Frequently launched discounts, the average price of Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau was less than 20 yuan, and during the soft opening period, a 5,000 cup lemon tea gift campaign was launched. Promotions, lower prices plus official account promotions, and consumers clocking in on social media have attracted more consumers and increased the number of queues.
Lu Ling, who studied at a university in Changsha, rarely lined up internet celebrity shops, and every time she saw someone sitting in front of a restaurant, or standing in line in front of a milk tea shop or a dim sum shop, she would hurried past. According to her recollection, the only time she entered the Internet celebrity store was when a dessert shop engaged in promotional activities and gave away a drink of less than ten yuan when she entered the store.
It was very hot, and Lu Ling was eager to drink an iced drink, so she waited in line for twenty minutes and squeezed in, and after getting a drink, she bought a small snack, and after squeezing into the crowd, she didn't think it was delicious. She said that at that moment, she felt that she was "routine" - after queuing up for a cup of free oolong tea, she felt that it was a bit of a loss not to buy something, but after eating, she woke up to "not buying the most economical".
Initially, Tea Beauty only opened a store in Changsha, and even had consumers from other provinces entrust people to buy across provinces, just to take photos of tea and antique paper cups to punch cards, counting the queuing fee and transportation costs, the inter-provincial purchase price can reach 800 yuan per cup. Lu Ling didn't understand why someone would be so fanatical: "Tea is pleasant to carry for an hour, the cream is melted, it is not good, isn't it just to punch a card?" ”
In addition, time-limited and limited supply is also a means often used when Internet celebrity shops are started, and Internet celebrity brands across the country have adopted this strategy. When the Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau first entered the Beijing market, the signature products fresh milk coffee mochi and fresh milk pickle mochi were also limited to two parts per person.
Yang Xi, who is still making scalpers, said that the only remaining internet celebrity shop in Sanlitun, Beijing, "Butter and Bread", is the last "battlefield" for scalpers in the queue. When it opened at the end of 2021, the queue for butter and bread reached 3-4 hours, and now there is still a queue of about 40 minutes during the day on weekdays. The three signature products of butter and bread are not only limited to one per person, but also only sold on the hour, and if you want to buy them, you must not only queue up, but also calculate the queue time. Therefore, the store is jokingly called "scalper and bread" by consumers.
Butter and bread store in Sanlitun, Beijing, Weekly Magazine/Photo
On the afternoon of a weekday in March 2022, Caijing Tianxia Weekly visited the butter and bread store in Sanlitun and found that the store had launched a small program that could only buy drinks, but bread and snacks had to queue up to enter the store for purchase, and the queue time was more than half an hour. Outside the queuing area, shops played the "Reject Scalpers" slogan, but not far from the placards, several scalpers were selling at a higher price with huge green bags printed with butter and bread or "B&C" at a higher price.
A scalper at the scene told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that the limited-edition product Wellington Steak Horn Bun was priced at 58 yuan in the store, plus a "queuing fee" of 42 yuan, and it cost 100 yuan to buy one from him. To the "Reject Scalper" sign standing not far away, the scalper said: "We are all selling things normally, and we do not interfere with their business, why should we care?" ”
The scalper said that the buyback rate of butter and bread is not low, and many white-collar workers who work in nearby office buildings will add scalpers' WeChat, continue to buy and require door-to-door service. However, compared with when the store was just opened a few months ago, the queuing time dropped from 3-4 hours to less than 1 hour, the queue customers were less and less, and the purchase fee for a single limited product was reduced from more than 100 yuan to dozens of yuan. "After a while, I won't do it, I won't make money, and I'll lose money if I do it again." He said.
Why is it difficult for influencer shops to last?
Over time, many consumers have found that many once unattainable influencer brands now seem to no longer need to queue.
The reason is that catering is a low barrier industry, any catering brand is very easy to be imitated, Hey tea, Lele tea, Naixue tea all make the same cheese milk cover fruit tea, although hey tea in many products behind the marked "first", but for consumers, a cup of similar tea where to buy, the difference is not big.
Chu Yang, who loves cheese milk cover tea, is not loyal to a specific brand, when commuting through the Guomao Mall, she will buy Lele tea; when she works, she can choose to go to the nearby Zhonghai Square to buy a cup of Xi tea; after work, sometimes she will go to Dawanglu, go to the shared office rented by friends, there are Xicha and Naixue stores near the Dawanglu subway station, and she and her friends always buy randomly. For her, no matter what the operating conditions of a tea shop and its position in the industry, as long as it has not failed and it is delicious, it is enough.
When explosive products are quickly imitated and competitors are gradually increasing, queuing has become a burden for consumers, and it has also affected the shopping experience of consumers and made consumers tired.
Lin Yue, chief consultant of Lingyan Management Consulting, said: "For a brand that already has a reputation, queuing is actually not important, but will become a slot point for consumer experience, queuing is a marketing method in the early days of establishment, after the development of maturity, digital tools can solve the problem of queuing." ”
Heytea is the first new consumer brand to use digital tools and do a better job of online ordering. In 2018, Xicha launched a mini program, through which consumers can place orders and estimate the time to pick up meals in the store to pick up or order takeaway. Two years after the Launch of the Mini Program, the queuing time of Heytea has been shortened by one-third.
Online ordering of mini programs quickly became the standard in the beverage industry, and Lele Tea and Naixue's tea also quickly established mini programs. For new tea drinks, mini programs can not only save consumers the time of offline waiting, but also make it more convenient for merchants to use coupons, points and other ways to promote. Moreover, the Mini Program has a takeaway function, and the merchant receives the takeaway order through the Mini Program, and no longer needs to be taken by the takeaway platform, which can effectively save costs.
In addition to small programs, adding stores can also reduce queuing time, allowing consumers to choose the nearest store to shop, without having to gather in the only few stores to queue.
From 2019 to 2021, Heytea added 745 stores across the country; in the same year, the number of tea beauty stores focusing on the Changsha market has reached more than 500. The expansion of the new baking track is also rapid, and at the end of 2020, when Mo mo dim sum bureau entered the Beijing market, it already had plans to open six stores in major shopping malls in Beijing, and quickly realized it later.
Xicha Store in Tongzhou, Beijing Financial World Weekly/Photo
Luxihe, which has always been indifferent to capital, has also opened 280 stores across the country, and stores can be found everywhere in its base camp, Nanjing. Fang Shuiqing, who lives in Nanjing, said that on weekends, the Luxihe store in xinjiekou in the city center still has long queues, but the Luxi River in front of her house hardly needs to be lined up.
Although the increase in stores has improved the consumer experience, it also marks that a brand has more market share and has the strength to go further. But on the other hand, if the stores are too dense, they may also dilute the flow of customers, resulting in competition between different stores, resulting in a decline in single-store profits.
The turnover rate of Haidilao and Green Tea is decreasing significantly. In 2020, 60 new green tea restaurants were added, but the total number of customers served fell by more than 4 million, and the turnover rate dropped to 2.62 times a day, with a loss of more than 55 million yuan. Haidilao also chose to expand against the trend during the epidemic, but many newly opened stores had less than 3 turnovers. Therefore, in 2021, Haidilao fell into the dilemma of "increasing revenue without increasing profits", with revenue of 41.11 billion yuan, an increase of 43.7% year-on-year, but the loss reached 4.163 billion yuan. As early as the release of the 2021 financial report, Haidilao decided to close about 300 stores in December 2021 that did not meet expectations.
Many well-known brands of new consumption are also facing a decline in profits and are forced to shrink costs. At the end of 2021, Cha Yan Yue Se temporarily closed more than 80 stores in Changsha, subsequently, Cha Yan Yue Se cut salary, founder Lu Liang personally went down and quarreled with employees on the hot search; Xi Cha and Nai Xue are experiencing a decline in ping effect and profits, the stock price of Nai Xue, which has been listed, fell from HK$18.86 to HK$4.51, down three-quarters; Heytea was exposed to lay off 30% of the staff after the Spring Festival in 2022; Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau was exposed to lay off 40% of the brand department employees, although Mo Mo denied it. The layoffs were normal personnel changes, but the industry remained skeptical about the profitability of the new bakery.
In July 2021, when the new consumption outlet had not yet passed, Titanium Media invited the founders of brands such as Baruma Rice Noodles and Ma Jiyong Beef Noodles to talk about catering, at that time, these founders who had just received financing were already aware of the existence of the catering cycle. One founder said anonymously: "Consumer tastes are cyclical, and catering is also cyclical... Entrepreneurs should be very cautious in choosing the internet celebrity shop model, once the customer puts a red label on us, it is equivalent to telling him: If you don't like me, you are out, but there is actually a layer of implicit hint behind this, that is, after a few years, if you still like me, you are also out. ”
According to the industry, the average life expectancy of restaurants is about 2.7 years, while the statistics of the "China Catering Report 2018" are more pessimistic, in this report, the average life expectancy of the catering industry is only 508 days, and the closure rate is as high as 70%. Although some large chain brands can survive for two, three or even ten years, if they do not do a good job in product research and development and innovation, they will still go down the altar.
Over the past year, a clear trend has been that capital has become more calm and cautious about new consumption that relies on online marketing to form hot spots. Starting in August 2021, there were fewer and fewer new consumer financing events, and by 2022, the number of new consumer financing events had dropped from more than 100 to 70 to 80 per month.
Zhu Danpeng, an analyst in the Chinese food industry, said: "The increase in the difficulty of new consumer financing shows that China's capital has begun to be rational and scientific, and there is also a deeper study of the development of the entire industry. If a catering brand does not have a good brand tone, business philosophy, supply chain integrity, scene innovation, product upgrade and service system improvement, it is difficult to impress the capital side. ”
Lin Yue, chief consultant of Lingyan Management Consulting, said that there is a problem that the popularity of net red shops is not lasting, and if you want long-term development, you still need to look at the innovation ability of products and the stable and sustained output of quality.
Jin Ge, an assistant researcher at Peking University and a doctor of journalism, has also publicly stated that no matter how well the advertising and marketing of internet celebrity stores are, if the products and services cannot bring consumers an experience that meets expectations, it is difficult to get repeat customers.
Zhou Chen, who lives on Qingnian Road in Beijing, has deeply experienced how an Internet celebrity shop is "from existence to nothing". A few years ago, he went to LADY M, known as the "Hermes" of the cake industry on the second floor of Joy City, and heard that this shop was from New York and was very famous, so he did not hesitate to queue for half an hour and spent 75 yuan to buy a piece of cake, which made him "feel very painful".
One weekend in early April this year, while hanging out in Joy City, he wanted to go to LADY M to see if anyone was still in line, but found that the store had already closed. He checked the news and found that as early as last October, three stores in Beijing Sanlitun, Chaoyang Joy City and Xidan Joy City were closed. He couldn't help but sigh in his heart, "The original Internet celebrity shop from New York is not ok." ”
(The consumer in this article is a pseudonym)
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