Source: IC Labs
The countryman chicken is going crazy on Weibo again.
It issued seven official WeChat messages in a row, revealing some key information within the company, including all the dish classifications, the ingredients, sources and processing techniques of 188 dishes, all the traceability information of ingredients, and the information of 202 suppliers.
The hometown chicken is even so intimate that it makes the supplier's phone number public.
This led many netizens in the comment area to say that after taking the public information of the hometown chicken, the next step is to go back to their hometown to open a hometown duck and a hometown pig.
But in fact, the current hometown chicken will definitely not be able to drive when it returns to its hometown.
The name "Hometown Chicken" is actually very misleading, it will make you think that it is the kind of small restaurant you often see on the streets and alleys, and enter a small restaurant with a rice bowl of 15 yuan and a topping of 20 yuan.
But when you walk into the countryman, the cruel price on the order page will wake you up and tell you: this is not your hometown, there is no hometown here, welcome to the ruthless commodity society.
After all, a real fellow will not drink 16 yuan a bowl of chicken soup, 18 yuan a piece of plum cabbage button meat, and will not spend nearly 40 yuan to eat a fast food.
You think it's a hometown chicken, but it's actually a white-collar chicken. is still a senior white-collar chicken, because the salary of ordinary white-collar workers is only enough for them to go to KFC every Thursday to suck the original chicken. Only the leading chicken who gives himself chicken blood every day in the workplace has the economic strength to eat a countryman chicken every day.
01
So the question is, why is the hometown chicken so expensive?
In my opinion, the power of the hometown chicken lies in its deep understanding of the white-collar group.
What is the biggest characteristic of white-collar workers? It's not that they're stressed, they're busy, they're not making a lot of money, they're not free.
Appear in the office on time at 9 o'clock in the morning, come out on time at 12 noon to let go, and come to the company on time every weekend to contribute a day of labor to the company for free.
The only uncertainty in white-collar life is that I am not sure if I can leave work at 9 p.m.
There is no synonym for freedom, that is, there is no choice, such as the choice of eating. If you don't want to wait for takeout, then the dining options are probably limited to a 5-minute walk downstairs from the company.
Why can't you go farther to forage for food? Because the lunch break is only an hour, the time is tight and the task is heavy, and you have to go upstairs to take a nap after eating, and the foraging radius is so large.
When white-collar workers are restricted in their freedom, then the business opportunity for the brand comes.
Think about it, where are the stores of the country's chickens opened?
Of course, it will not be a residential area where old neighborhoods gather, the most important thing for restaurants near residential areas is cost-effective, and neighborhood aunts and uncles can fight with you for half an hour even for five cents a dollar to buy vegetables. At the price of a countryman's chicken, I was taught to be a man by a variety of rice bowls, ramen, wontons, and dumplings for more than a dozen yuan a minute.
Not to mention all kinds of community canteens, the kind that gives a 50% discount with an old age card, that is a god, a god of community business.
The battlefield of the hometown chicken is the road that white-collar workers must pass through in their daily lives day after day, year after year.
02
In fact, Lao Xiang Chicken itself has disclosed that it has 4 types of stores, Class A is a flagship store, Class C is a community store, and Class D is a canteen store in an industrial zone, but none of them are mainstream.
The largest number, accounting for 60%, is actually Class B stores, which are located in office buildings and shopping malls.
Considering that many shopping malls and office buildings in China are supporting constructions and belong to the same commercial body, we can basically conclude that the money earned by the countrymen is the money of white-collar workers.
White-collar working meals can naturally be a little more expensive than other fast food.
Recently, a few of my friends quit their jobs and entered the gap period, and I asked them what they thought, and the general one is: there are many things that we think are just needed to consume that are not consumption, they are all work taxes, and it is the world's malice towards social animals. You can really save a lot of money without going to work.
For example, you don't have to have two cups of coffee a day anymore, and you can save at least 20 yuan.
For example, when you oversleep, you don't have to spend dozens of dollars to take a taxi to work.
Another example is that you don't have to eat expensive working meals anymore.
In my opinion, the lunch of white-collar workers is not a meal at all, but a means of production for workers. As long as you want to create value at your desk, you have to eat lunch to stay productive, and you have to pay a duty tax to the restaurant downstairs.
When a brand spends a lot of money to rent a shop on the ground floor of an office building, it also means that it spends a lot of money and becomes part of your payroll recovery plan.
If you have time to cook by yourself, if the company can work remotely, if the company provides a free canteen, then no matter how expensive the hometown chicken is, what does it have to do with you?
The countryman's chicken is expensive, not in the chicken soup and the buckle meat, but in the heaviness of reality.
03
Since the working meal track is such a good business, what is the hometown chicken occupying, not the hometown fish, the hometown goose, the hometown prefabricated dishes, and the hometown Cthulhu.
We still have to go back to understanding the white-collar crowd.
What is the difference between white-collar workers and ordinary salaried workers?
The difference between the two groups is not in their income, but in their expectations for the future.
Ordinary salary couples often don't think too well about their future development, with a monthly salary of 5,000 this year, and they don't think that they can get a 30% salary increase next year. Money is saved, not raised.
White-collar workers generally believe that there is an upward development path in their careers, from the front line to the middle level, from newcomers to seniors, from commissioners to management, and their income and workplace status will also rise.
Expectations affect consumption, so many white-collar workers define their current consumption level by their own development prospects in the next three to five years, so the consumption of white-collar workers is more price-less than that of ordinary wage earners, and there will be a large number of unnecessary "emotional value" consumption.
And Lao Xiang Chicken happens to be the one that provides the most emotional value for white-collar workers among many working meal brands.
In China's fast-food chain industry, chickens account for half of the country. KFC is chicken, McDonald's also makes chicken, Zhengxin chicken steak is chicken, Wallace also has chicken, village base is indispensable for chicken, and real kung fu is indispensable for stewed chicken with mushrooms.
But chicken is different from chicken, and on the other side of the brand, chicken is the core ingredient and the most important meat dish to support a meal. And in the hometown chicken, the chicken appears in the form of a bowl of chicken soup.
In fast food, soup is a dispensable thing, and like drinks, it is an accessory, and sometimes even a bonus.
However, in the Chinese food system, soup is a very value-added item. Some people drink soup to warm their stomachs, some people drink soup to maintain health, some people think that drinking soup helps digestion, and some people think that drinking soup is spiritual healing. Whether there is a bowl of soup or not, it represents whether a meal is hearty or simple. Determines whether the emotional value of the meal is full.
And Lao Xiang Chicken goes one step further, it makes chicken soup a trump card. In the supply chain of Lao Xiang Chicken, the chicken raw materials used in other dishes are purchased from peers, only the chicken soup is more special, and it uses self-raised, higher-quality Feixi old hens. Not only is the chicken soup not an accessory, but it doesn't come with it in most courses, so if you want to drink it, you can order it for 16 yuan.
It can be seen that the status of chicken soup in the hometown chicken is no less than the status of sucking the original chicken in KFC, which is the façade and signboard.
If other brands sell consumers full food and sufficient calories, then the chicken soup that Laoxiang Chicken sells to consumers is emotional value and a sense of abundance. In Chinese fast food, only the hometown chicken provides these for the white-collar workers, and only the white-collar workers are willing to pay for these extra things.
04
But is emotional value really nihilistic? Not necessarily.
Materially, the white-collar class is undoubtedly not the most affluent, but spiritually, the white-collar class is often the most anxious.
There are many things that white-collar workers are afraid of, such as layoffs at the age of 35, rectification of the workplace by interns, sudden downtime of the body, sudden concern of HR, depreciation of assets in hand, and skyrocketing assets that have not yet been bought, fear that the industry will develop too fast and they will not be able to keep up, and fear that the industry will not develop and only stock competition will remain.
The more anxious people are, the more willing they are to pay for emotional value.
Body, mind, spirit, yoga classes, knowledge payment, and psychological counseling are all tailored for anxious white-collar workers. Hiking and camping, tennis and skiing, specialty coffee, and Sam's Club are all for white-collar workers to confirm their status with consumption.
And a bowl of 16 pieces of chicken soup is just the one with a relatively low unit price in this form of consumption.