Seeking social status: You are what you eat?
Print Edition
FOOD that becomes a sensation in online forums is a profitable business out in the real world. A cup of Heytea milk tea or a piece of Baoshifu pork floss cake can mark you as a person of social status, if you have the time and money to squander.
Heytea is a Guangdong Province-based milk tea chain, and Baoshifu, or Master Bo, is a Beijing-based pastry shop chain. They are currently the biggest hits in Shanghai, as witnessed by queues of customers waiting for five hours or more for their celebrity food fix.
Wanghong shipin, or literally “web celebrity food,” has also spawned the popularity of Gelaoguan bullfrog hotpot and Xinghualou qingtuan (green sticky rice dumplings) that have a newly concocted filling of dried meat floss and salty egg yolk.
“I was very curious about the taste, so I came here to wait,” said Xu Miaomiao, 28, an office worker standing at the back of a long line zigzagging over for several turns in the central court of the downtown Raffles City.
First-floor space at the mall has been cleared to make room for the queue, security guards maintain order to prevent queue jumping and teashop waiters keep a keen eye out for scalpers.
Xu, according to the queue number held in her hand, was the 836th customer of the day at Heytea. A security guard said she might have to wait five hours to get a cup of the shop’s signature Jinfeng tea king, freshly brewed from Shizuoka matcha powder, imported cheese from Australia and Taiwan Oolong tea.
Scalpers prowl the area, looking for customers too impatient to stand in line. For 80-100 yuan (US$11.60-14.50), they sell lower-number queue tickets. The tea itself costs about 25 yuan.
“We receive more than 1,000 customers every day,” said a waiter in charge of handing out queue numbers that entitle each customer to buy a maximum of three cups.
So is the tea really worth all the effort?
“Well, frankly speaking, no,” said Rainbow Zhao, 35, after she finally got to taste the tea after standing for hours in the queue. “It features fresh brewing, but a chain tea shop obviously won’t use the very best tea leaves.”
Despite negative feedback, customers keep lining up.
Heytea opened its Shanghai outlet in February and has invested heavily in advertising on social media. The company is so successful that it recently attracted venture capital investment of about 100 million yuan.
The situation is pretty much the same at the Baoshifu pastry shop just opposite Raffles City. Long queues there, too, plus the usual scalpers. Each customer is limited to no more than 1 kilogram of the floss cake at the center of all the hype.
One scalper said he earns about 300 yuan a day, shuttling between the queues at Baoshifu and Heytea to do business.
Eager customers can also “hire” people to stand in line for them. A smartphone app called Linqu charges 0.5 yuan for every minute of queuing. It will also deliver the food once purchased.
“I placed an order to buy some cakes at Baoshifu at 10am and they arrived at 5pm,” said Xu Wen, a designer. “They charged me about 100 yuan.”
Shanghai Daily observed that about 10 percent of people in the queue at Heytea and Baoshifu were from the app Linqu.
“It’s a part-time job, and the app takes a 10-20 percent commission on each order,” one errand runner said.
Some people in Shanghai ask friends to bring Baoshifu cakes home with them when they travel to Beijing, where queues are only about 30 minutes.
Customers have mixed reviews about these sought-after cakes.
“They are delicious, and I love them,” office worker Shen Ke told Shanghai Daily as he shared some cakes with colleagues after a business trip to Beijing.
Rainbow Zhao, however, said the yolk eggs were dry and the cakes tasted plain.
“Food bubbles” are easily shattered. Late last week, the popular Shanghai bakery chain Farine on Wukang Road, which made what it called “web celebrity bread,” was forced to close after inspectors found the company using out-of-date wheat flour. Fans said they were “heartbroken,” and the French owner of the chain fled back to his home country on the day the scandal broke out.
“I think the ‘web celebrity food’ trend is not about the food itself,” said Liu Changxi, director of Economics and Sociology Department at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. “It’s symbolized consumption. It does not matter if it’s really delicious or not. If you have a popular web food in hand, it sends a message to your social network: ‘I’ve got something hot, hard to get and you don’t have it’.”
Such is the substance of the Internet era, Liu added. Something goes viral, fanned by marketing campaigns or personal experiences shared on social networks like WeChat and Weibo. It’s like a rolling snowball, gathering mass as everyone wants to join in for fear of being left out in the cold.
“But when the supply grows, like more chain stores opening, and access become easy, the status symbol disappears and people become more rational,” Liu said. “Queuing for something up to 20 or 30 minutes is understandable, but for several hours — that’s far too crazy.”
Indeed, Xinghualou’s green sticky rice dumplings were the “in thing” last year. It took four hours in a queue to buy a box of the snack. This year, with many more food stores offering the same floss-and-egg yolk green dumplings, the fever has abated.
The long lines at Heytea and Baoshifu not only provoke comment online but also have many passers-by scratching their heads.
“I think it’s just a merchandising stunt,” Zha Junyan told Shanghai Daily as she walked past Raffles City. “As if milk tea could cure cancer!”
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