Returning youth, copying the second-hand life of the city in the county

True Story Plan

2024-04-29 18:20Published in Beijing, creator in the field of documentary

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Returning young people are replicating their life experience in first- and second-tier cities to county seats. In the past two years, many young people have chosen to leave the big city and return to the small county town to start a business, and they have opened fashionable cafes and fusion restaurants, which are unique in the simple county streets. These new things have captured the curiosity of small places and allowed county residents to begin to experience a second-hand urban life.

This kind of replication of second-hand life, which not only transplants experience, but also cultivates the consumption habits of local people, is constantly transforming the lifestyle of the county.

A café in a self-built building

The sign of Han Xiangmei Cafe is white. The bold word "coffee" is stamped on the silver-gray corrugated iron plate, which obscures the triangular roof of the self-built house in the county where the café is located.

In Guangfeng District, Shangrao City, Han Xiangmei Cafe is one of the few cafes in the local urban-rural junction and has successfully survived. In the first month of its opening, it sold an average of 6 or 70 cups of coffee a day, with an average daily turnover of about 1,500 yuan.

The café is located at the fork in the road where Guangfeng No. 1 Middle School is located, about a 10-minute drive from the center of Guangfeng City. There is no scene of high-rise buildings in big cities, and the small shops in the typical self-built houses in the county constitute the most active and vivid business district here.

In the fall of 2022, "Huahua" will be 30 years old and decide to end more than ten years of studying and living in Hangzhou, and return to Guangfeng, the hometown of Huahua's husband, with a child who has just turned 1.

While the consumer demand in the first-tier cities is gradually saturated, a group of young people who have returned to the county from the first-tier cities to start a business have moved the lifestyle they are accustomed to in the city back to the county, made them into goods that can be sold, and made money by selling "second-hand experience". Under their portability, the lifestyle of light food, cat cafes, video game halls and other stores that were originally popular in first-tier cities and served white-collar workers living in office buildings and rental houses began to appear on the streets of the county.

The birth of "Han Xiangmei Coffee" put the owner Huahua as a habit of drinking coffee in Hangzhou.

Huahua is a native of Zhoushan, Zhejiang, and went to Hangzhou to study at university after graduating from high school. After graduating from university in 2016, she entered the workforce, and gradually developed the habit of drinking coffee out of the needs of work. The first time I bought coffee was in a foreign coffee brand chain store, Huahua ordered a cup of American coffee, the price of 2 or 30 yuan was not cheap for students, but Huahua was also within the range of affordability after work. On her first attempt, Flowey only tasted bitterness. She quickly went a second time and ordered coffee with milk.

In Hangzhou, coffee and coffee shops play different roles in Huahua's life. Coffee, as a refreshing drink, helped her maintain her work spirit and energy in the office, and she began to experience the various flavors of different coffee beans after drinking one cup a day during the week. A coffee shop, on the other hand, is a space where you can relax and chat with your companions during your leisure time.

At that time, some boutique coffee shops sporadically popped up on the streets of Hangzhou, and when brightly dressed white-collar workers consumed in the store, the bright floor-to-ceiling window decoration showed this consumption scene to passers-by on the side of the road.

Unlike the reinforced concrete office buildings in the city, this brick and wood structure is a self-built house in the countryside for some years. Before the landlord rented it to Huahuakai Cafe for an annual rent of 20,000 yuan, it housed a small restaurant specializing in local snacks. Like most local restaurateurs, the owner of the snack bar simply painted the walls and used it for several years, so the simple interior of the house could not meet the needs of creating a flowery café atmosphere. Therefore, after getting the key to the house, Huahua began to renovate the walls and renovate the doors and windows.

When the renovation started in mid-to-late November, when the weather in Guangfeng began to turn cooler, the decoration team removed the alloy glass windows of the restaurant with the words "mutton powder" and "pork powder" and replaced them with a set of retro wooden doors and windows. This set of wooden doors and windows seems to be made of old technology, but they are actually the old windows that were removed during the renovation of the old house of Huahua's husband. After returning to Guangfeng with her children, Huahua stumbled upon the old house when she visited it, and at that time she was already determined to open a café in the county, so the idea of reusing this old set of windows with retro decoration came to her.

Determining the Chinese retro atmosphere in the café, Huahua began to search for furniture in the right style. Once, she visited her husband's uncle's house and fell in love with an old-fashioned wooden cupboard, and the family knew what she thought, and later, it was her husband's grandmother who found a wooden cabinet in the village that had just been renovated by a neighbor who had just renovated a new house. Then, Huahua bought a box of navel oranges, went to the neighbor's grandmother's house, changed the wooden cabinet back, polished it and painted it with a new color, and put it in the store.

Figure | The old cupboards in Han Xiangmei Coffee's store are commonly found in the homes of the elderly in Guangfeng

With the name, the café is infused with soul. In first-tier cities where online celebrity stores are clustered, the name is an important item to distinguish a number of small stores with a sense of atmosphere. A name may be the finishing touch to the style of an atmospheric shop, or even the concept center of an online celebrity store, where the store will combine the style of the store name to design and decorate, select the products sold in the store, and name the products.

When choosing a name for this retro-Chinese shop, Huahua heard her husband mention her grandmother's name, Han Xiangmei, and with her intuition, Huahua decided that these three words were the most appropriate official name for the café. It comes from a woman who grew up in this land, and the coffee-drinking lifestyle is separated from the county residents, and the name shortens the distance, adds a sense of intimacy, and surprisingly fits the decoration style of the small shop. Soon, "Han Xiangmei Coffee" decided on a name, opened in time for the Spring Festival in 2023, took root in the self-built buildings in Guangfeng District, and launched a takeaway service in the county.

Young people who smell business opportunities continue to bring the lifestyle that has been almost involuted on the streets of big cities to the county seat for sale. In this process, in addition to goods, new aesthetics and new trends are also the main body of handling.

How to carry a sense of atmosphere that is popular in a big city, and sometimes typical furnishings of a certain decoration style. Chen Yutang runs a café on the street of Youxian County, with a large folding window. During the time of Zhang Luo's renovation, he spent a lot of time every day browsing social media posts about the café's renovation. He discovered the upward folding window, which has become popular in various Internet celebrity coffee shops in first-tier cities in recent years, and has become a powerful tool to create a "sense of atmosphere" in the decoration of these beverage shops.

Originally, Chen Yutang planned to find a shop in the county seat to build it, but he found five or six carpenters and door and window masters in the county, and no one mastered the craft, and they could not understand why this young man insisted on making a novel folding window out of thin air, and finally persuaded him to switch to a sliding window style that had been used for many years.

Eventually, Chen Yutang contacted a manufacturer in Changsha through his mother's acquaintance and ordered the windows of the store. Due to the size of the window openings and concerns about safety, the window was finally made to fold to both sides at the suggestion of the manufacturer. By the time the windows arrived, the renovation was already three days behind schedule.

Figure | Chen Yutang participated in most of the renovation of the milk café

Chen Yutang grew up in Youxian County, Hunan Province, and dropped out of school to work in the middle of his third year of high school, and his friends called him "Ah Tang".

Ah Tang is a person who has copied the way of life in the county very early. In 2018, 20-year-old Chen Yutang became the first clerk at a café in the county. That year, the first time he drank coffee was when he was working in a bubble tea shop, which launched a Hong Kong-style coffee in order to increase its competitiveness in the county market. Chen Yutang tasted coffee for the first time out of the needs of work. The taste is slightly bitter, which is different from sweet and greasy milk tea, and Chen Yutang likes it even more. Later, he quit his job in a bubble tea shop and tried to apply for a job as a county barista.

At that time, there was no coffee training class in the county, and Ah Tang, who knew nothing about coffee, relied on searching for video tutorials on the Internet to learn the craft of coffee making, and tried to learn himself to become a qualified barista in the county. He downloads the tutorial, and sometimes, he can't keep up with the speed of the video tutorial, so he needs to drag the video progress bar repeatedly, pausing again and again to observe the details of the demonstration until he learns the key steps. When he was learning latte art, he studied for an afternoon and finally made a heart on a latte.

Later, after working in a coffee shop for 4 years, Ah Tang often went to Changsha, Guangzhou and other cities at his own expense and in his spare time to find more professional baristas and coffee shops to learn skills. It was also during that period that he realized that coffee was more than just a drink by looking at the storefront. In the city, the fashionable and bold decoration of the coffee shop and the variety of menus record together, creating a scene where the lifestyle takes place, which is also the difference between the understanding of coffee in the county and the city.

To a certain extent, as a barista in the county, Ah Tang is a "porter" who transports the second-hand experience from first-tier cities to the county. At that time, the county, whether it was consumers or coffee shop owners, did not have much concept of coffee. These experiences and feelings brought back by the barista Ah Tang have inadvertently cultivated consumers' understanding of this second-hand lifestyle experience in big cities.

The county-based transformation of the second-hand life experience

In the summer of 2023, in order to promote craft beer in a county town in Liaoning, the owner of a craft beer shop bought a mobile wine punch with his friends, prepared four barrels of wine in the trunk of the car, and went to the square to promote it. After setting up the stall for 7 days, only one person who returned to his hometown to visit relatives on vacation showed interest. In the first year of opening, the owner invested 400,000 yuan, but the turnover was only 200,000 yuan.

To replicate a commodity that is commonplace in a big city to a county seat, operators need to pay the cost of explanation, go through a long period of market acceptance, and localize the product. Opportunities and hardships coexist here, it is a blue ocean, but also a soil with poor demand, which requires operators to study hard and cultivate the consumption habits of local residents.

Zhou Zhou's coffee shop survived for only eight months in a county in the western part of Chongqing. In 2022, she rented a storefront for 800 yuan at the entrance of the community where she lived and ran a coffee roastery as a side business. She hung a white cloth with the name of the shop on it, and the menu was set up in a simple way, with the exception of Americano and latte, all of which were coffee with adjusted flavors.

Office workers in first-tier cities consume coffee to refresh themselves and reduce fat, and coffee appears as a relatively new beverage in the life of consumers in the county, and they pay more attention to the taste of coffee.

In 2018, after graduating from university, Zhou Zhou came to work in a state-owned enterprise in this county and bought a coffee machine. She has lived in Chongqing since she was a child, and has been consuming coffee and bread since middle school, and has also attended a coffee making training class.

The first time she brought the coffee machine to the office, she made four or five cups of American style and distributed them to her colleagues. Many colleagues couldn't stand the rich bitterness and sourness of coffee, so they had to ask Zhou Zhou to add some sugar to their coffee. For the next year, Zhou Zhou sold coffee in his office. Colleagues believe that coffee, like other beverages, should first meet the standard of good taste, so Zhou Zhou began to research special blends, mixing other drinks with coffee. She bought a small Xiaoice box to store other materials such as milk and coconut water in her office. That was the first time Zhou realized that if you want to sell, you must respect the ideas and wishes of customers.

When he first came to this western county from the main city in the company's car, Zhou Zhou longed to leave his parents and live a truly independent life. The buildings here are not as densely populated as in the main city, the sides of the roads are more open, and the trees are much greener. It's very suitable for retirement, Zhou Zhou thought to himself at the time.

According to Zhou Zhou's observation of working in the county for many years, most of the young people in this district and county go out to seek development. In the downstairs of the unit in the community where she lives, an elderly person moves out his mahjong table, and one table is full of people sitting all day. The nightlife is also closed early, and the old man and the old lady dancing in the square have basically disappeared at nine o'clock. There is even less entertainment for young people, and if they want to play script killing and escape rooms, Zhou Zhou and his colleagues have to drive to the main city. She can clearly feel that this place is lagging behind the main city, which has been popular for three or four years, and only appeared on the streets of the district and county in the past two years.

In fact, the local people's spending power is not bad, and the prices are not lower than those in the main city of Chongqing, and Zhou Zhou always sees luxury cars parked on the side of the road, and even a Maybach is often parked in front of the store. However, the long-term lack of a consumer market has limited the local demand for new consumption formats.

With the idea of opening a coffee shop, Zhou Zhou has an optimistic imagination that there is no shortage of young people who are willing to consume in public institutions. But in fact, in the eight months since opening the store, she has only accumulated a dozen regular customers, and only occasionally brings in new customers. When it is not optimistic, the daily turnover is less than 100 yuan, and the maximum passenger flow on holidays is only 4 or 500 yuan.

Consumers who are accustomed to low prices have a hard time making up their minds to walk into a store that looks high in price and spend money inside.

Eight months after opening the store, Zhou Zhou sent away more than one customer who complained about the price. She said that even if they catch up with the trend to consume freshness, it is difficult for county consumers to change their perception and accept a drink priced at about 20 yuan.

When Li Luo was promoting in the live broadcast, she often saw someone commenting: "Every time I pass by your store, I don't dare to enter, I think your store is too high-end." ”

Among the restaurant signs with yellow letters on a red background, Li Luo's shop is particularly conspicuous. In the evening of Qianjiang, as the incandescent lamps on the signboard were turned on, the fragrance of supper also dispersed with the fierce smell of oil smoke. Qianjiang, Hubei Province is famous for crayfish, and the diet is also heavy on oil and spicy, and there are many crayfish shops and private food stores on the streets. Different from the simple decoration of the restaurant, Li Luo's shop has a huge coffee cup hanging from the front of the store, and red roses are pouring from the cup all the way to the ground.

Figure | A customer taking a photo in front of Li Luo's store

In August 2023, Li Luo's beverage shop will open on the first floor of the self-built building on Qianjiang Baojia Road. For more than half a year, she has had to explain the reason for the pricing to consumers in the county again and again, "Our raw materials are different, the atmosphere is different, and you can drink a cup of coffee for an afternoon or a night." "In the eyes of consumers in the county, a cup of coffee is more than 20 yuan, which is beyond its value and is not pragmatic enough.

In order to attract more customers, Li Luo launched a preferential group purchase, a cup of American-style and two strawberry egg tarts for less than 20 yuan. But young people who replicate the lifestyle of big cities in the county, especially those who open cafes, need to compete with chain brands for customers.

Chain brands can make small profits but quick turnover, and their production scale and profit territory determine that they have room for appropriate price reduction competition in the county. This is difficult to replicate for self-operated brands with small costs, because the costs are real, and there are no high profits in other business areas that can share the costs evenly. Group buying has become their main battlefield to meet the pursuit of cost-effective consumers in the county.

Opening a café in the county seat seemed like a bold and risky decision at the time. But in fact, the data shows that at that time, county-level cities and urban-rural areas had already brewed the soil for its survival when people were not aware of it. In 2021, Luckin Coffee aimed at the county market and began to enter the market with 0 franchise fees. By the end of July 2022, Luckin had more than 1,700 Luckin stores in Tier 3 and below. Following this, Starbucks, a foreign coffee brand, also entered the county market in December 2022. The sinking of chain brands has also created opportunities for more people to start businesses against the county. At one time, "county coffee" became a hot word on social platforms, and there were more than 90,000 notes related to "small town coffee" in Xiaohongshu.

Change the way of life in the county

Residents of the county are still adjusting to these new trendy shops.

In Chenghai District, Shantou, Guangdong, a small restaurant opened between factories in the new district of the county is owned by two young people who have returned from the big city. Inspired by the city's fashion trends, they decorated the restaurant in the style of a Japanese eater. On one side of the store, they designed an entire wall of bookshelves with souvenirs the owner had collected from his travels, as well as a framed portrait of the two of them.

There are only a dozen or so places in the restaurant. During the Chinese New Year, only diners who have made a reservation in advance are guaranteed to eat in the store.

On the third day of the Lunar New Year, a middle-aged couple from the county with their two children pushed open the door and entered the store.

Seeing the decoration of the store, the couple was a little stunned. The young waiter greeted him and asked if there was an appointment.

Booking?

After hesitation, the middle-aged man confessed that he didn't know that he needed to make an appointment. After looking through the reservation information, the waiter reminded that a family of four could take a seat in a row of seats lined up along the street and order food.

The middle-aged couple looked at the row of seats, and the family members could not face each other after taking the seats, perhaps because they were worried that they would not be able to take care of their young daughter, or perhaps they were not used to this kind of layout where the family ate at the same table and did not see each other, they glanced at each other and hesitated.

The waiter didn't notice anything unusual and handed the couple a menu.

"So expensive?" the man raised his voice, and after calming the two children, he pulled the family out of the store. The price of food and beverages has created a threshold for local residents.

However, there are still some shops that are really transforming the lives of county residents.

Huahua's landlord is a local man in his 60s in Guangfeng. usually speaks the local dialect, because Huahua is a foreigner, so when the old man communicates with her, he will switch to Mandarin with an accent.

Soon after renting his self-built house to this girl who had returned to the county from Hangzhou to start a business, he found that the house had been transformed into a small café with a unique style.

He was one of the first customers of "Han Xiangmei Coffee". In the Spring Festival of 2023, not long after the café opened, the old landlord brought his friends to see the freshness. The menu is in the same style, with common coffee names such as "American" and "Latte". The old man didn't care about the menu, and said directly to Huahua: "Have a cup of black coffee." To be on the safe side, Flowey asked the old man, "Do you want to add milk or not, hot or iced?" A few minutes later, the old man got a hot latte.

After that, he took his friends to order coffee a few more times, and each time it was black coffee with milk. When they got up and left, Flowey went to see that the cups were empty. But by chance, when Huahua made tea by herself, the landlord came to the store, and Huahua poured him a cup of tea to entertain him, and he never ordered coffee again. Although the landlord is receptive to the taste of coffee, he is more accustomed to drinking tea, and he suggested that Huahua add tea to the menu and sell it for 15 yuan a cup to attract people of their age to come and spend it. Huahua didn't agree, but every time he came, she made him some tea to drink. He can't smoke in the store, so he and his friends often sit on the table and chair outside the store with a teacup, smoking while watching the occasional car pass by on the road.

The old man loved to play cards, and after that, he often brought his friends to the store to spend time, and only left to play cards when he got the news that there were enough people in the game.

Half a year after opening the store, in the summer of 2023, Huahua's husband also resigned and returned to his hometown. With the loss of the main income support, the profitability pressure of Han Xiangmei Coffee Shop has increased. After the opening of Han Xiangmei Coffee, Guangfeng opened four or five coffee shops one after another, some of which opened in the center of the county, but most of them closed down in less than a year because the turnover was difficult to support the rent. Huahua realized that it was difficult to attract and maintain customers and increase revenue with coffee alone. She had the idea of expanding the store, hoping to meet more needs of the locals with coffee and food, clothing or bread in a larger space.

County residents are also more cost-effective than city residents. In order to retain customers, many shopkeepers have had to make adjustments, some allow customers to order fried chicken takeout in the store, and some have directly expanded the chess and card area for students to do homework and play board games. Zhou Zhou also brought his game console and projector to the store in the later stage of the store, and added a bartending service in the evening.

Returning young people are still the main group of coffee consumers in the county. On holidays, the twenty seats in the flower shop are filled, and there are not enough extra chairs, so some young people can only sit in the flower bed at the door with their coffee. Ah Tang also said frankly that after the National Day holiday last year, there was a significant decline in passenger flow, and the order volume of 5 to 60 on weekdays can only maintain daily operations, and the real profit has to rely on holidays.

After returning to their hometowns, some young people were pleasantly surprised to find that the county town had finally opened a decent café, and when they opened the door and walked in, they found that the atmosphere was completely different from the city. In the store, mothers with children sit around a table and chat loudly about the gossip of relatives at home, several men at the next table each have a cigarette, and a few students play board games in the distance. In the noisy atmosphere, if he wanted to chat with his friends, he could only raise his voice.

According to the survey data, the average working time of young and middle-aged people in the county is 7.2 hours, and the average time for online entertainment is about 2.5 hours per person, and the rest of the time can be used for housework, offline socialization and entertainment. In a county town where the entertainment space is not saturated, not knowing where to go to spend time becomes a sweet annoyance.

Around 2011, when Ah Tang was in middle school, two cafes opened in the county one after another. One of them, which is located in front of the middle school, is a café, but it is mainly engaged in the milk tea business, and Ah Tang's classmates often go there to party. Another nominal coffee shop, which is occupied by local middle-aged people all year round, looks more like a chess and card room. It now seems that the two cafes at that time did not have the form of today's cafes.

Li Luo still remembers that when she was in middle school, she and her friends often went to a simple Western restaurant in Qianjiang during holidays. For the teenager Li Luo, that place can give her a glimpse of the life of a fashionable city. It was short-lived, and I had to leave after eating.

As an adult, she walked out of Qianjiang, a county-level city, to Wuhan, the provincial capital, and traveled to more cities one after another. Along the way, she found that many of the shops sold an aesthetic atmosphere. While attracting tourists to check in and take pictures, they also leave a certain amount of consumption. Li Luo also hoped to create such a space in her hometown, so she had a drink shop that later opened on the street.

Without adjusting the urban trend, it is difficult to land in the county. Someone moved the popular "window coffee" in the big city to the county seat and opened a small shop of 8 square meters, but many customers complained that it was "simple, no grade" and "not even a place to sit".

In order to make full use of the space and meet the needs of more people, Li Luo designed different spaces for the store. In the front is an American-style retro-style café, and in the back is a new Chinese-style tea room, and there is a small courtyard next to it to make tea. In winter, tea brewed around the stove is more popular than coffee.

Figure | In winter, customers make tea around the stove in the yard

Today, Li Luo's drink shop has become an intermediary for some young county residents to experience the outside world.

The drink shop is located near a local high school. Recently, a senior high school student often takes advantage of the lunch break to come to Li Luo's shop and order a cup of coffee. She attends classes from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day, with a tight schedule and only one hour off at noon. Students are interested in photography and coffee, and when Li Luo makes coffee, she often observes in front of the bar. A few times, Li Luo invited her to try it out by herself and taught her by hand.

The sound of the grinder is deep, and when you tinker with these fashionable utensils in the store, it is a time for female students to come into contact with the fragments of life in first-tier cities before going out to study.

* At the request of the narrator, some of the characters in the text are vague

- END -

Written by Yang Xiaoqian

Editor|Wen Lihong

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