County confinement center: spend half a year's salary also have to sit confinement

Author | Tail Fire

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The third-tier town also loves the confinement center

"The rooms are already full in June, and they're almost full in July."

Hong Xia, a cousin who is the head nurse at the confinement center, told me that the business of the confinement center where she works is not generally hot now. The cousin, who was about to unload, even had to drag her relationship to grab a spot.

My hometown of Xiangyang is a standard third-tier city, the house price has just exceeded 8,000, and the per capita wage is less than 5,000. The lowest price for staying in the cheapest small room in the confinement center for 28 days is: 21800 yuan.

There is no doubt that this is an extremely luxurious consumption for most people.

However, even so, the Center of the Moon is still bursting into flames in this third-tier town. My cousin has been working in the confinement center for six years, from a general nurse all the way to the current head nurse, and this small town with a population of more than 5 million has also sprung up six or seven confinement centers in these six years.

Expensive confinement centers no longer seem to be an exclusive experience for the middle class in first- and second-tier cities, and young mothers in third-tier cities are also eager for this new idea.

So, spending half a year's salary confinement, is it worth it?

A temporary paradise for a high fee

"January 20,000, change to a temporary haven"

The yuezi center where Hong Xia works is about 6 kilometers away from the city center and can be reached in less than 20 minutes by taxi. Instead of a detached villa, they rent a two-storey hotel-style apartment, in addition to 25 rooms for the new mother, as well as a kitchen, a baby room, an activity room, and other large and small rooms.

The corridor of the confinement center

"The environment of our confinement center is not top-notch, but it is still a service that wins." Hong Xia introduced the various items included in the Confinement Center package like a number of family treasures.

There are two modes of confinement here, one is to hand over the baby to the unified management of the confinement center, and the mother lives in a room alone and holds it to the mother when feeding. The other is 1V1, the baby and the mother live together, but also equipped with a special nurse to take care of, the price is naturally more expensive.

Among the cheapest 19800 packages, there are 50 postpartum recovery programs, including foot baths, moxibustion, facial treatments, pelvic testing and restoration, and more. Even the confinement meal has as many as five meals a day, and in addition to the normal three meals a day, it also includes a fruit dessert in the morning and once in the afternoon.

The cheapest package item in Xiangyang Yuezi Center

Most of the new mothers who live in the confinement center are just for one reason: to be quiet.

A mother who insisted on staying with her second child is still haunted by the experience of her first pregnancy.

"Don't talk about your mother-in-law, even if you are a mother, you can argue with each other." She recalled that when her mother came to take care of her confinement, she did not know where to listen to the popular science, insisting that she could only eat chicken during the confinement period, so she ate either fried chicken, chicken soup or eggs every day. Until now, I can smell as soon as I see it.

In the confinement center, three meals a day have a chef to make for you, and this pregnant woman even specially posted the daily confinement meal in her video number.

Confinement meals are served at the Confinement Center, with meat and vegetable pairings

"Eating" is probably the smallest problem a mother who has just given birth can have.

All along, we seem to be secretive about the various pains and pains that women encounter in pregnancy and after pregnancy, using only one sentence "great mother" to cover up the torn lower body, the embarrassment of constant leakage of urine, hemorrhoids, constipation, unbearable pain in the breasts during breastfeeding...

Talk show actress Huang Ali once used 18 forbidden jokes on talk shows to depict her body destroyed after giving birth, and she used the little plums destroyed by wild beasts in "Wilderness Hunter" to describe the breasts "ravaged" by babies.

"Ari, how did you get so thin after giving birth?"

"She squeezed my life dry!"

A star living in the United States still suffers from such pain after pregnancy, and new mothers in third-tier cities face only a lot more problems. Mother-in-law or mother-in-law still stick to the old "confinement guide", can not wash their hair, do not let you use diapers, a meal is a big fish and meat, and even blame you for being too squeamish.

When you live in the confinement center, you can temporarily say goodbye to all kinds of complicated chores, and there will be professional nurses to teach you. At this moment, the confinement center is like a safe haven, providing shelter and a pure land in the most vulnerable moments of mothers, so that she can gradually adapt to the new identity of "mother".

Living in the confinement center, you can see the nurses taking care of the baby through video

In addition to maternity programs for mothers, the confinement center also provides a number of baby services, including jaundice testing, hearing training, and more, the most common condition of newborns.

An important task of Hong Xia is to observe the stool of each baby every day to monitor the baby's physical health.

In addition to the physical need to endure all kinds of pain, there is a high probability that new mothers who have just given birth will also have depression and pessimism without warning.

Studies by the World Health Organization and a number of professional institutions have shown that 60%-80% of women will have different degrees of depression during pregnancy and after childbirth. Most of them will get better within a few weeks, 20% will develop clinical depression, and a very few severe cases may lead to tragedy.

In addition to avoiding mostly unnecessary social interactions in confinement centers, new mothers can also find women here who have the same experiences and troubles as themselves.

A mother who has already been confined describes the days at the confinement center this way: "Those 28 days were the only days after I became a mother, and they were simply heaven on earth. ”

Of course, not all women can get this 28-day buffer period, and 20,000 yuan is still a big investment for a third-tier city family.

The cousin who is ready to live in the confinement center is a non-staff member of the public institution, only about 3,000 yuan a month, and the husband is still interning in the hospital, and the month is almost the same. This huge amount of 20,000 yuan can only be paid by her mother-in-law, and for her mother-in-law, these 20,000 yuan can make her liberated labor very painful, while more families can only be stretched.

According to Hong Xia, the new mothers in their confinement center now have a variety of occupations, including business, civil servants, teachers, banks, etc., but most of them are local well-off or above. Some local women can even take out the dowry money to live in the confinement center.

"Ordinary rural people still can't afford to live."

In the little woman's gang, someone asked "can the money to live in the confinement center let the mother-in-law out", at the same time, someone in Zhihu asked "Is it too pretentious for the wife to spend 30,000 yuan to live in the confinement center".

Sometimes, human tragedies and joys are not the same. The "temporary paradise" of the Confinement Center is obviously only limited to new mothers with banknotes.

"Profiteering" outside the wall, struggling to survive inside the wall

" It is better to work in the confinement center than to be a sister-in-law of the family "

"It's a good business, but it's hard for us to make money." My cousin Hong Xia told me that most people have a big misunderstanding of the confinement center, and it is actually difficult to make money in this business.

Hong Xia is actually a yin and yang to enter this industry, six years ago she spent thousands of yuan to train for the certificate, originally wanted to do the month to make money. At that time, the confinement was still a new and fashionable industry in our small city, and the confinement center was a rare thing.

Hong Xia's first boss was the first batch of crab eaters, when his confinement center had just opened and recruited a large number of people. Because her son was also very small and needed to be cared for by her mother, Hong Xia was forced to give up her sister-in-law and work in the confinement center.

"No way, when the sister-in-law wants to live at home, then your nephew will not have anyone to take care of it." My cousin told me with some pity that if the sister-in-law could get a salary of eight or nine thousand or even more than ten thousand a month, now she has become the head nurse at the confinement center, and she still has only 4,000 yuan a month.

The cheapest small room in the center of Yuezi where Hong Xia is located

At the beginning, the price of Xiangyang Yuezi Center was even more expensive than it is now, with an average price of nearly 30,000.

"Later, there was more competition, more and more confinement centers, and the price gradually came down." Hong Xia told me that in the first few years, the boss was just losing money. After all, each month's rent, manpower, etc. are not a small amount of capital, and the occupancy rate of the confinement center is very low, and it can only lose money every month.

It wasn't until the last two or three years, when the Confinement Center caught fire on the Internet, that business began to improve. In the second half of 2019, Hong Xia's confinement center finally began to make money, but it was at this time that the epidemic came.

The final result is that the boss closes the shop and leaves.

At that time, Hong Xia jumped ship to the Yuezi Center where she is now, which is a franchise chain brand with stores in almost every city in China.

The confinement center can take care of up to 25 new mothers and more than 50 employees. The monthly fixed expenditure is not small, and the confinement center of this kind of serviced apartment is already the least costly.

Like a single-family villa-style confinement center, the upfront cost is higher, and it takes longer to make a profit. The particularly high price also makes this high-end confinement center the choice of a very small number of families.

Nurses like Hong Xia, who work in the Confinement Center, not only work very intensively, but also receive a small salary.

"I'm relatively good because I'm the head nurse, which means I worry a lot." Like ordinary nurses, they also have to work night shifts, two shifts, 8 hours a day, 24 days a month, and their salaries are only more than 3,000 yuan. ”

Cousin doing vision training for her baby

Hong Xia said that the work in the confinement center is not only hard, you need to take care of newborn babies and new mothers who are very sensitive to emotions, and there are also high requirements for people's mental strength.

"There is definitely conflict and friction, the key is to be patient."

Yuezi Center is such a "very profit-making" industry, when netizens scold the IQ tax on the Internet, the industry is not like other "IQ tax" lying down to get money. On the contrary, it also requires a great deal of knowledge and patience on the part of the practitioner.

Heavy services, heavy assets, low frequency, destined to be an industry with high profit costs.

Fork in the road in the center of the confinement

"Do you want to go to confinement when you lose your family?"

In fact, the profit curse of the confinement center does not only appear in the third-tier cities, even the first-tier cities charge up to 100,000 monthly confinement centers, which may also be struggling for survival.

Contrary to common sense for most people, in this "profiteering" industry, most people are losing money:

In the currently listed Yuezi Center, the New Third Board's Xixi Mother and Baby and Damei shares have been losing money for many years, and The Xi Home and Fuzuo Mother and Baby have been delisted, and only The Emperor Palace has a meager profit.

The model of confinement centers actually originated in Taiwan, and the background of its large-scale rise is not only the rise in social productivity and the improvement of people's consumption power, but also includes many aspects such as family low birthrate, changes in social form and structure, and improvement of mental health attention.

The postnatal care market in Taiwan has developed rapidly in the past decade, and the penetration rate of postnatal care institutions in Taiwan has reached 62.46% in 2021, which means that almost two out of every three pregnant women will choose to go to the confinement center to sit in the confinement center.

In mainland China, where the cultural background is almost the same, even in first-tier cities, the penetration rate of confinement centers is only 7%. In third- and fourth-tier cities, the figure is only 2%.

The mainland's confinement center seems to have entered a fork in the road, in order to achieve profitability can only go in a higher-end direction, there are constantly "sky-high" confinement centers on the Internet brush sense of existence, so that ordinary people stay away.

On social networks, confinement centers are always linked to high prices

This also means that a large number of new mothers with ordinary incomes will either go to live once or be turned away. And even the mother who lives in the confinement center may face a large number of "IQ tax" maternity and health projects, which is the real profit point of each confinement center.

In contrast, the market has matured in Taiwan, the price range between postpartum care institutions is very large, postpartum care is not entirely high-end consumption, and consumers of all income classes can find a confinement center suitable for their own consumption level.

Let choice stop being an issue

Do luxury goods or do mass consumer goods?

There is no doubt that Yuezi Center is also a blue ocean market with great potential.

The use of "IQ tax" and "sentimentality" to describe this new way of confinement seems to carry a natural arrogance and prejudice. But at the same time, the extremely high unit price and the almost inability to complete effective screening also make most ordinary families sigh.

Being able to receive scientific rehabilitation services after childbirth is actually the just need of every mother. Providing more price ranges and trying in a more sinking market is the mission that the head confinement center should focus on, rather than competing with whose room is larger and more luxurious, who has a higher price, and whose maternity project is more curious.

We prefer that after searching for "confinement center", the question that arises is no longer "Can ordinary families live in the confinement center?" Instead:

"What kind of confinement center should my family choose?"

*All characters in this article are pseudonyms.

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