The young man became fascinated with the ten-dollar shop again, and the owner lamented that he was lucky that he didn't do the restaurant

"Ten dollars can't buy losses, ten dollars can't buy fools." In this era, "ten dollars" seems to be reshaping people's view of consumption.

Online, nine pieces of free shipping is a magical slogan, which has become a means for e-commerce platforms to obtain customers; Offline, ten-yuan stores such as MINISO and Manku have also begun to expand rapidly.

The low price effect of ten yuan has also brought bright revenue data, and on September 15 this year, MINISO, known as the "king of ten-dollar stores", increased its net profit by 177.2% year-on-year; The main cheap Pinduoduo achieved a net profit of 8.1 billion yuan in Q1 2023, a year-on-year increase of 212%. Behind the data, an era of low-price retail is coming.

Why is ten bucks so magical? How did the ten-dollar shop model become popular again? Daily People visited a number of ten-yen stores and chatted with store managers and customers who were on the front line of consumption, and they talked about their real experience of running a ten-dollar store, which was about the choices of the times and how to live better.

Text | Yang Luyuan Zhang Chenmeng

Edit | Yi Fangxing

Operations | Circles

Re-hot

"Even if a fire burns your ten-dollar shop, I won't feel a pity!"

Ji Shengqiu's husband finally broke out. In the midst of the loud noise, he blurted out the pent-up voice of the past seven years.

This is related to the fact that Ji Shengqiu's ten-yuan shop business is becoming more and more popular. Because the better the business, the busier she is. This 10-yuan store is located in the pedestrian street of Weifang, Shandong Province, which is the beginning of the school season, and the store is often crowded with customers, mostly young people. Every day, she was busy until 11 p.m., or even later. Even eating is a luxury, and "the opportunity to eat together as a family is like the New Year."

"Ten dollars can't buy losses, ten dollars can't buy fools." This sentence is familiar to everyone in China. As the name suggests, in Ji Shengqiu's ten-yuan shop, everything is ten yuan, from necklaces, stud earrings, hats, sunglasses, to pendants, dolls, ornaments, cosmetics, to beauty and skin care daily necessities, covering almost all aspects of life.

The popularity of the ten-yuan shop gave her a great sense of security. Today, the down payment for their house is saved by a ten-dollar store. Speaking of this, she is quite proud, "I don't want to spend his money." But her husband hopes that she can "get along with her husband and teach her children" and focus on her home. The two sides often quarrel over this.

This dispute, in a sense, is a footnote to the revival of the ten-dollar store. This year, especially in the past few years, there are too many small shops that can't stick to it, but Ji Shengqiu feels that he is lucky and chose a ten-yuan store, so he can survive. Other types of shops may not be so lucky. A few steps away from her shop, a grilled fish shop that has gone from two floors of pre-pandemic facades to only one floor, more than half of its staff has been laid off, and chefs now post small advertisements on the streets every day.

▲ Figure / Visual China

Crises often contain a glimmer of life, and Ji Shengqiu's experience is not alone.

About 200 kilometers away from Ji Shengqiu's ten-yuan shop, in Tai'an, Shandong, He Jiajia's ten-yuan shop business is also becoming more and more popular. As the store manager, she personally held up the loudspeaker and shouted: "Ten yuan full of warehouse, ten yuan for the whole scene..." The shouting was so loud that it overwhelmed the noise of the street. "Ten Yuan" seems to be the magic of the four words, whether it is a young person, a couple holding arms, or a baby father and mother pushing a stroller, they may become potential customers of this green signature ten yuan store.

He Jiajia remembers the day when the business was at its hottest. Under a sudden thunderstorm, all the umbrellas in the ten-yuan store were snatched up that day. In her shop, umbrellas do not increase the price, and they are still ten yuan a pair. After the goods were sold out, "I had no choice but to brave the rain, ride an electric car, rush to other branches to urgently borrow umbrellas, and then transport them back to sell." She was a little embarrassed that day, but she was happy when she told it.

Taking Tai'an, Shandong, where He Jiajia's location is located, as an example, if you really come here to take a look, you may be surprised by the number of 10-yuan stores here - in this third-tier city with a GDP per capita ranking of the middle level in Shandong, there are 3 MINISO, 5 full stock 10 yuan stores, 2 "that cat's pocket" 5 yuan stores, and 9 miscellaneous 2 yuan stores. This is only the number in the city of Tai'an, and does not include the county towns under its jurisdiction.

And the number of ten-yuan shops in Tai'an City also proves the popularity of the ten-yuan store model. If people find a business model effective, they often invest repeatedly, and in Tai'an, He Yuan himself opened four ten-yuan stores. Seven years ago, he opened his first ten-dollar shop, and more and more followed. Especially during the epidemic, most people chose to close their stores, but he opened a ten-yuan store into a new mall in the city.

"Although the turnover and footfall during the epidemic have been greatly reduced, it is still sustainable." He Yuan said. Now, after the epidemic, the positive flow of four ten-yuan stores also confirms his choice.

The vitality of weeds

If a store with a large investment and a high unit price is compared to a delicate potted plant, then the ten-yuan store is more like a vigorous weed, which can survive in harsh conditions. And once the environment improves, the weeds will grow more luxuriant.

Ji Shengqiu, who has been running a ten-yuan store in Weifang, Shandong Province for seven years, is familiar with the level of consumption here, and she often likes to modestly refer to Weifang as a "small county town". She is extremely sensitive to changes in consumer trends here.

Now, for example, she finds that people today tend not to spend more than necessary. "Although you can get a cheap price through group purchases and coupons, people here will also consider whether they need it, because cooking at home, wouldn't it be cheaper? Try not to spend the money that can be spent, this is people's current view of consumption. ”

This perception also affects the business of the ten-dollar shop.

Last year, due to the epidemic, it was the darkest moment for small shops, and they were closed for a month and a half. "I was very stressed and irritable every day."

In order to survive, Ji Shengqiu tried to open a "virtual ten-yuan store" on social platforms, sharing the goods in the store on it every day. As a result, "I didn't expect so many people to want to buy things in my store, especially people in some big cities outside the province, they think ten yuan is quite cheap." So Katsuaki mailed it to them, and she was pleasantly surprised by this extra income.

Demand from big cities outside the province kept her ten-dollar shop alive. This also shows from the side that ten-yuan shops can "eat" all over the country.

▲ Figure / Visual China

And now, the popularity of the street has recovered, and she has seen the light. Every day at half past nine, the door of the store opens, and people huff and go inside. "No one has to worry about goods, and some people are even more worried about lack of goods." Goods in the store are often in short supply.

In China, if you want to talk about ten-yuan stores, you must not be able to bypass the "king of ten-yuan stores" - MINISO.

Inspired by the ten-yuan store, in 2004, a Hubei man named Ye Guofu opened a chain of jewelry stores called "Oops", which once grew to more than 2,000. In 2013, Ye Guofu founded a company that deals in daily miscellaneous goods, selling not only accessories, but also daily necessities, toys, etc., named MINISO, and the Chinese name is MINISO.

For a time, MINISO almost fought with Japan's MUJI in price. For example, mugs and socks with hundreds of yuan in MUJI, only a dozen to dozens of pieces in MINISO. Relying on the cost performance, MINISO has expanded rapidly since its establishment in 2013, and its prospectus shows that more than 50% of the goods in the store are ten yuan, and as of last year, the number of MINISO stores worldwide reached 5,440. Therefore, it has a nickname - the king of ten-dollar shops.

Today, MINISO has once again ushered in rapid development. Its user profiles show that about 60% of consumers are young people under the age of 30. On September 15 this year, MINISO released an interim results announcement showing that its net profit increased sharply by 177.2% year-on-year, reaching 1.769 billion yuan, and its stock price doubled during the year.

But it is not only MINISO that seizes the opportunity of the times, but also a ten-yuan store.

In 2014, MINISO was busy expanding its enclosure in China, with more than ten times as many new stores a year as MUJI. Also in this year, a Jinan man named Yu Shuming, went to the United States and Japan to investigate, after seeing the 10-yen store in the United States and Japan, he said that he "didn't dare to scream", and the 7,000-square-meter "100 yen store" Daiso Department Store in Osaka, Japan, left a very shocking impression on him, and a year after returning to China, he also founded his own brand in Jinan - Manku 10 yuan store.

Manku ten-yuan stores, starting from Yu Shuming's base camp in Shandong, have also begun to expand nationwide, and now they have opened about 500. Especially Shandong people, must be no stranger to this. In addition, Yu Shuming also launched the "That Cat's Pocket" five-yuan store, which is cheaper and more sinking. A full-stock promoter also claimed that this year's store opening momentum is very strong, counting the five-dollar store, the number of stores opened is as high as 100.

Why ten dollars?

Looking at home and abroad, similar to the model of ten-dollar stores, it seems that consumers in every country have their own set of psychological prices for such stores.

In Japan, "100 yen shops" are generally opened; In the United States, it is the "one-dollar store"; In the UK, it's a "pound shop". In China, people are more accepting of ten-yuan shops. It can be seen that the value of these amounts is roughly comparable.

Feeling that money is worthless – that's probably what many people think these days. People ask, "What is the purchasing power of ten dollars today?" "But actually, on the contrary, what you can buy for ten bucks is quite abundant.

"Before opening this ten-dollar store, I couldn't believe that the cost could be so low." Ji Shengqiu, the owner of the ten-yuan store in Weifang, Shandong, was surprised even by the cost price of the goods in the store. Not only is it cheap, but the quality is also good, "although it only costs ten yuan, the quality is not lost to expensive goods at all."

People who pursue cost-effectiveness like to visit this type of ten-dollar store, especially students, or people who have just worked. Young people will buy blind boxes, water cups, books, small bags, and office workers will buy some household items, such as storage boxes, slippers, water cups and sunscreen hats. Ji Shengqiu is very satisfied with the ten-yuan stool in her store, she feels that "there is no place where the stool is more cost-effective than ours", and some small companies do team building for employees, and they all come to her to buy stools in bulk.

▲ Ten-yuan goods in a store full of warehouses in Shandong. Figure / People of the Day

And Ye Guofu, the founder of MINISO, also had his own explanation for the pricing of ten yuan. In order to create a feeling that consumers are "taking advantage", ten yuan belongs to a gold price. He once said, "To let customers come to your store to buy if they want, use it if they want, this is the best thing, must achieve this situation, so 10 yuan is the gold price, so customers do not have any pressure." ”

Not only that, the price of ten yuan is also convenient for interpersonal word-of-mouth communication.

In early September, in the Manku ten-yuan store in Tai'an, Shandong, such a scene happened. Wen Miao, 22, was dragging her mother into a crowded ten-yuan shop, "wanting my mother to see what we young people are shopping for, saving her from always saying that I buy a bunch of small jewelry and spend money indiscriminately."

▲ Figure / Visual China

She has no resistance to the words "ten yuan good goods", but her mother disdains them, "Ten yuan can have any good things, I don't want to squeeze in, let's use some good quality." "Shoving her and leaving.

But unable to resist her daughter, Wen Miao pulled her mother and squeezed into the store. Mother's gaze was quickly attracted by the housewares in the store, she always wanted to buy a clothes basket and a footwash bucket, but every time she went to the mall and saw it, it was a little expensive, and she felt that it was not too necessary. "You can wash your feet in an ordinary basin at home, so you don't have to buy a foot-washing bucket." The mother said on her lips, but she couldn't put down this pale green foot-washing bucket in her hand, held it in her hand, checked it repeatedly, and came up to it, sniffing hard for the smell of inferior plastic, trying to find some evidence of poor quality.

"Just ten dollars, take it." The shopping guide standing on the side watched her hesitate for a long time, and also came up to introduce her. There are also protrusions at the bottom of the basin that massage the feet, and the feel of the plastic bucket does not pick out the fault, "It's really not okay to take this bucket home and use it for shabu mops." Wen Miao directly pulled her mother to check out, and in the end, the two of them squeezed out the ten-yuan store with a huge foot-washing bucket.

"My mother also dislikes it, but her body is very honest." Wen Miao held her mother and said. In this way, the ten-dollar store has another potential customer.

In addition, the determination of the price of ten yuan is also closely related to the background of the times when the downward pressure on the global economy increases and everyone "tightens the money bag".

If you refer to the rise of Japan's "100 yen shop", you can see that it emerged in the second half of the 90s of the last century. Data show that from 1998 to 2003, the compound revenue growth rate of Daiso Department Store in Japan was as high as 40%; Between 1990 and 1999, MUJI's operating profit increased more than a hundredfold.

The 1990s were also known as Japan's "lost decade." With the bursting of the real estate bubble and the economic downturn, Japan's GDP growth plummeted from 6% to 0.6% from 1991 to 1993, almost zero growth. The most resilient middle class, which is the most resilient, suffered the most, and after cutting spending, the "100 yen shop" encountered a golden period of development.

But the ten-dollar store model also has obvious drawbacks.

First of all, due to the low-price strategy, its profits are bound to be greatly compressed. A franchisee of a ten-yuan store in Shandong told Daily People that the store's gross profit is about 30%, but if you deduct freight, rent, labor, damage, water and electricity, "the net profit is pitiful, only 10%." Of this 10%, the company also deducts another management fee of one percent of sales, and the rest is what franchisees get.

According to this calculation, about 10,000 pieces of ten-yuan goods must be sold a month, and the monthly income will reach about 10,000 yuan. This is a purely volume-based business, extremely dependent on customer flow, which is equivalent to selling more than 300 items per day.

Second, a considerable number of consumers are still skeptical about the $10 product. In Jinan, Shandong, Li Xiang, who is still a sophomore, except for accompanying his girlfriend to visit the Manku, "has no desire to squeeze in at all" at other times. He commented that most of the contents were "beautiful waste", and he felt that when he bought them, they were left in ash.

Ten Dollar War

Nowadays, as consumers increasingly focus on cost performance, competition on the track of ten-dollar stores is also intensifying.

In a shopping mall pedestrian street in Licheng District, Jinan, Shandong, MINISO's huge red and white logo is quite conspicuous. Next to it, less than 100 meters away, is a five-yuan store "The Cat's Pocket", next to it, there is also a ten-yuan store that is being renovated and about to open. Just as there is often Kudi coffee next to Luckin Coffee, between the ten-dollar shop and the ten-dollar store, the smell of gunpowder is also quite strong.

"Now we can account for 70% of the goods in our store for ten yuan." Xin Ran, the manager of MINISO, emphasized, "But we are not (only) a ten-yuan store. "In the store, masks, socks, tableware and other goods are ten yuan a piece, but hats, sunglasses, dolls, cups, etc., are often 39.9 yuan or 49.9 yuan.

The competition of ten-dollar stores has also spawned the differentiation of forms. MINISO is now changing in a more refined direction. As founder Ye Guofu hoped, "value emotions should be valued." Nowadays, MINISO has begun to co-brand a large number of well-known IPs such as cats and mice, Hello Kitty, etc., and the price is often more expensive - such as the recently popular Barbie co-brand, which will be placed in the most conspicuous position in MINISO, and a small notebook printed with the Barbie pink logo costs 19.9 yuan.

Interestingly, in the past, people often referred to MINISO as a replacement for MUJI, but now, even MINISO itself has many replacements. Everyone has similar models, and the concept of "high quality and low price" is also the same. According to MINISO's investment policy in 2023, franchisees need to pay 19,800 yuan in royalties every year, while Manku is signed for three years at a time, paying a total of 60,000 brand royalties, and then paying 10,000 yuan per year.

But no matter how fierce the competition, at the end of the day, it is the competition of the supply chain.

In the book "Yiwu, the Hometown of the 100-Yen Shop," written by a Nihon University professor, it is stated that "almost all the items handled in the 100-yen shop" in Japan come from China, and the store can hardly operate normally without the goods provided by China. From this point of view, China's local ten-yuan stores have more advantages in the supply chain.

However, all ten-yuan stores with brands such as MINISO and Manku usually adopt a unified supply model, a considerable part of which is directly cooperated with the factory, and some of which are designed by their own designers to continuously launch new products and maintain freshness.

According to the "2023 China Consumer Insight White Paper", after the epidemic, "refinement" has become a consumption keyword, more than 92% of consumers said that their consumption concept is more conservative, and they need to plan or reduce consumption more carefully, and 45.6% of post-00s young people said that they will try product replacement.

But even so, as long as it is a ten-dollar store, it will encounter a difficult problem that cannot be crossed: ten yuan, how to really ensure quality?

The 24-year-old Yiqin, who is studying graduate school, is also a frequent customer of the Manku 10-yuan shop. But she doesn't buy everything - small necklaces, small stud earrings and the like, and the most she buys is a pack of paper drawers for ten yuan.

▲ Figure / Visual China

"But there are some things I wouldn't buy." She wouldn't buy anything at a ten-dollar shop, including all the cosmetics, perfume, and even water glasses she used on her body. "It's okay to use gadgets, but it's okay to use things that are really used on your face." The implication was that she still couldn't fully trust the ten-yuan store. However, according to the clerk, the sales of beauty and skin care products are still good, especially some middle school students and makeup novices, who will buy these to practice low-cost cosmetics.

But neither consumers nor operators actually have much more choice. Just like one night in mid-September, Ji Shengqiu of Weifang, Shandong Province, was still busy in his ten-yuan store. She is still late from work, and the ten-dollar shop is like an iceberg, straddling between her and her family. For seven years, she put all her heart and soul into the store, she took on the responsibility of supporting her family, and she also caused her family to alienate her, and she was also powerless to talk about it.

Can the ten-dollar shop continue to be popular? She didn't know. "I've been in this business for seven years, and I can't step into other industries, and I won't do anything else, really."

"So I can't lose my job." She said finally.

(All interviewees in the article are pseudonyms)

The article is original by Daily People, and infringement must be investigated.