Employees of freshly made beverage shops are in a "horse-like" situation

Employees of freshly made beverage shops are in a "difficult situation"

2024-07-18

Reporter: Shi Ge, He Xinye

Intern reporter｜Han Cheol-hee

Editor: Xu Shiyu

On June 20, three videos of conflicts between baristas and customers in different stores of the coffee brand Manner were exposed one after another and quickly went viral.

Although the causes of the conflict varied, they were all caused by urging orders, so soon the voice of public opinion began to extend to a deeper issue: Manner employees were working too hard. In reports from many media, this was specifically described as "only one person was assigned to each store with a daily turnover of less than 5,000 yuan." A Manner employee in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai regions refused to be interviewed, but told us that "reports like this are all true."

A profile picture of a Manner store in North Bund, Shanghai, taken in January 2023.

On June 21, Manner announced that it would strengthen employee training, optimize store operations, and open up a channel for caring for barista partners. Now that half a month has passed since the incident broke out, has Manner begun to fulfill its promise and make adjustments?

In early July, netizens in Beijing, Guangzhou and other places posted on social platforms, saying that they noticed that Manner near the company had recently added staff during peak hours, and some stores shortened their business hours, postponed the opening time in the morning, and moved the closing time from 22:00 to 18:00 or even earlier. A part-time employee of Manner in Shenzhen confirmed that "some stores adjusted their business hours", but did not know the specific details of the adjustment; another netizen posted a screenshot of a WeChat chat record that "Manner opened a 'partner feedback through train' to collect partner opinions to help optimize operations." As of press time, Manner officials have not yet responded.

Does the pressure on front-line employees only exist at Manner?

If we zoom in on the ready-made beverage industry where Manner works - new tea drinks and chain coffee shops - we can see many complaints from frontline store employees on social media: endless fruit to cut, endless tea to brew, endless ice to add, endless new products to learn, endless tapioca pearls to cook, endless orders to place, and unreasonable customers... Such posts always get many likes and comments from store employees who have had similar experiences. Clicking on the homepages of some of them, it is not difficult to see the most important characteristic of beverage store employees - youth.

In 2021, "bartender" was included in the list of "new occupations" jointly released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and other departments. Compared with "working in an electronics factory" or being a waiter in a restaurant, tea drinkers and baristas are a more respectable "new blue-collar" occupation. There are many users on Xiaohongshu who say they "graduated from college and switched jobs in state-owned enterprises to make milk tea". The profession of barista is more mature and systematic.StarbucksBrands such as , have shaped the professional image of baristas in the public's perception, and barista competitions and ratings have given this profession some glory. Owning a coffee shop in the future is also the goal of many junior baristas.

The 2022 China New Tea Drink Supply Chain White Paper released by consulting firm Sullivan shows that as a typical representative of the modern service industry and digital economy, new tea drinks provide a large number of job opportunities for practitioners in the tertiary industry such as bartenders and takeaway deliverymen, and the market has obvious characteristics of sinking, which can bring employment opportunities to more low-tier cities. According to the statistics in the white paper, the midstream of the industry chain can provide more than 1.3 million jobs for the headquarters and regional office personnel of new tea drink brands, as well as store employees. If coffee is included, this figure will be even larger.

But the real dilemma of this industry is obvious. On the one hand, well-known brands have attracted many young people to join, while on the other hand, front-line staff are busy and even overloaded in stores. Behind this is the ready-made beverage industry, which has developed rapidly in the past 10 years and is still expanding with stores. The competition among brands is fierce and even tends to be "involutionary", and this "involution" ultimately puts pressure on the front-line employees of the stores. According to statistics from Zhushi Consulting, a total of 10.5 billion cups of drinks were sold in domestic ready-made tea shops in 2023Q1-3. Simply put, 4.5 cups of drinks are sold every second, and this is only new tea drinks, not counting coffee.

In order to increase competitiveness in terms of product quality and stability, brands often develop detailed standard operating procedures (SOPs); at the same time, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, a store will often reduce manpower as much as possible. This situation is the optimal solution calculated by every brand after commercialization and capitalization.

Today, freshly made beverages have become one of the most common consumer products that covers every street and alley. When an industry or a company begins to move from emerging to mature, its development ceiling is no longer limited to whether it can produce explosive products and optimize the consumer experience. More importantly, it is how to establish a sound and reasonable employee management system, and of course, salary and benefits and career development system. That is, it should assume due responsibilities to customers and employees at the same time.

After the Manner incident, we interviewed a total of 10 front-line store employees from multiple ready-made beverage brands, including Manner, Luckin Coffee, Heytea, Bawang Chaji, Mixue Bingcheng, and Cha Yan Yue Se. We also interviewed labor lawyers, service industry human resources experts, etc. to understand the living conditions of front-line employees of ready-made beverages and the crux of the problem.

Stores: One or two people support an "assembly line"

After the Industrial Revolution, each production unit focused on processing a certain segment to improve work efficiency and output, which is the well-known assembly line. Freshly made beverages also adopt the idea of assembly line production, but the number of "production units" supporting each production link of the entire assembly line has been extremely compressed and streamlined.

One person has one position, and one position is equivalent to a workshop - all the store staff of different brands we interviewed agree with this statement. Take Heytea as an example, the positions of a store are divided into "cashier position", "tea serving position", "fruit position", "tea brewing position", etc. At the same time, the number of staff in the store is determined by the system calculation and the store manager's shift schedule.

In all freshly made beverage shops, there are two important and tedious links outside the sight of consumers, namely "opening early" and "closing". If a store opens to the public at 10 am, the employee responsible for "opening early" usually arrives at 8:30. During this one and a half hour, the employees of the milk tea shop need to boil tea soup, cook small ingredients, and cut and prepare many kinds of fruits. For brands such as Heytea and Nayuki's Tea that have many fresh fruit tea products, preparing fruits alone includes peeling grapes, green grapes, cutting mangoes, honeydew melons, pickling pineapples, etc. Coffee shop employees need to preheat the coffee machine, make ice, prepare ingredients such as matcha and milk cap, and replenish common materials such as coffee beans and ice cups.

Closing the store is a more troublesome job. Zhang Yi, a Heytea employee at a franchise store in the southwest, said that all utensils need to be cleaned and disinfected using the "five-step method", which means that all utensils need to be cleaned five times. At the same time, they also need to clean the countertops, scrub the sinks and cabinet doors, sweep and mop the floor, and check expired items.If we start to sort out the equipment from 9:30 pm, we can officially leave work at around 11:15 pm. In addition, we also keep sorting goods, buying goods, replenishing goods, and cleaning.

Many brands are trying to use more digital means to improve the efficiency of front-end operations. For example, the "automatic tea-shaking machine" can be seen in stores of Heytea, Nayuki's Tea, and Bawang Chaji. It is similar to a fully automatic coffee machine. Just click the button on the screen, and the machine will automatically configure and pour out the liquid base in about 10 seconds.

However, manpower cannot be completely replaced by machines. Adding toppings, adding ice cubes, adding a layer of wax paper to the cup lid for takeout orders, and finally covering and bagging are still completed by employees. Different products such as some brands of fruit tea and smoothies also require different lids, which employees need to memorize and complete.

The popularity of hand-beaten lemon tea has added a new job for tea shop clerks: beating lemons.

At the same time, mechanization also means that the duration of certain processes cannot be shortened by human will. In the Manner incident, some people suggested that no matter how anxious the customer was, the extraction speed of the coffee machine could not be made faster. Moreover, different brands use different machines and different speeds. For example, in order to emphasize its boutique attributes, Manner still insists on semi-automatic mode and retains some manual operation links, but for customers, the services of all chain brands should be the same.

Machines may not necessarily improve efficiency. In addition to automatic tea-shaking machines, Heytea has also launched automatic tea-brewing machines, automatic pit-removing machines and other automated products. Zhang Yi's store is indeed equipped with relevant machines, but since the store does not have a large number of orders per day, the cleaning of the machines is very cumbersome and they are not actually put into use.

Additional manpower is needed for the "customized needs" from customers in the notes. A Luckin employee revealed that he had encountered many "weird" notes, such as "Velvet latte only needs half velvet" and "Meteorite latte with more meteorites". In order to meet a user's demand for "lemon without pulp", he used a spoon to scoop out the shredded lemon pulp bit by bit. If he did not follow the notes, he would receive a bad review, which would affect his performance level.

Some brand marketing events will also increase the burden on front-line store clerks. A former operator of Nayuki's Tea said that when new co-branded products are launched, a large number of customers who want to obtain peripherals will flock to the store, but the number of peripherals allocated to each store is very limited. At this time, the store will send the "most emotionally intelligent" clerk to communicate with customers. The opaque cup types used in some co-branded products will also affect the efficiency of the production and cup-out process-originally, the clerks only needed to look through the appearance to judge what kind of product they had in their hands. The opaque cups forced them to check the labels on the cups again. On an assembly line, the addition of any action will lead to a loss of efficiency. The employee said that when designing marketing activities, the headquarters sometimes lacks consideration for the work of front-line store clerks and lacks reasonable management and regulation.

However, actions outside the regular SOP, or an increase in workload when "orders explode", will not bring more salary to employees. The salary of front-line employees in freshly made beverage stores usually consists of "base salary + commission". The 10 employees we interviewed mostly received a monthly salary of 3,500-4,500 yuan. The base salary varies by brand, city, store type (direct or franchised), and employee level, while the commission is linked to store performance and assessment results. It is a comprehensive result, with the assessment results accounting for a larger proportion. It can be said that commissions reward employees for following certain rules, not more orders or workload.

Data map. 2023On September 4, the day Luckin Coffee withdrew its soy sauce latte, a staff member was seen making soy sauce latte in a Luckin Coffee store in Beijing.

Some unreasonable marketing mechanism designs sometimes result in "multiple losses". The recent "1 yuan ice cup angered two groups of workers" incident at Michelle Ice City is an example. On July 3, Michelle Ice City launched a full ice cup product for only 1 yuan. Due to excessive demand, some stores were short of ice cubes. Some consumers placed orders and were not informed of the product after arriving at the store. Some store staff said "Ice cups don't make money, so we won't make them", but the staff's attitude also caused dissatisfaction among consumers. Michelle Ice City said that it will coordinate the transportation of ice cubes to nearby stores or regions according to actual conditions, and strengthen employee service training.

If you think about it carefully, Mixue Ice City franchise stores cannot make money on the "ice cup" product, which is a hot product but lacks innovation. Employees feel that their workload has increased, and consumers whose orders were "returned" did not receive the products. It seems that only Mixue Ice City has earned the marketing gimmick, which has also made the ready-made tea beverage industry, which has already entered the "low-price" trend, even more "competitive". This problem cannot be solved by transporting ice cubes or strengthening training.

Beverage shop clerk, living under the control of the backend system

From the perspective of business growth and brand development, every freshly made beverage store strives to provide consumers with high-quality, standardized beverages. In this chain, "employees" have also become a link that must be "standardized." In addition to the standard action of "serving a cup," the speed of serving, quality, hygiene, and whether there are food safety issues are all included in the assessment, becoming another high-voltage line for front-line employees.

For example, Luckin Coffee, which is strong in digital operations, also has a clear digital orientation in employee management. Two Luckin employees from different cities revealed that Luckin Coffee requires the preparation time of a cup of coffee to be between 30 and 90 seconds. If it is slower than this standard and the timeliness rate does not meet the standard, the store's assessment will be affected, and the clerk will also need to write a report on the cause of the "slow cup preparation".

Hygiene and food safety are factors that the brand attaches great importance to. Luckin has even formulated strict hand-washing standards for this purpose - 20 seconds each time, and changing disinfectant water and washing cloths every half an hour. A clerk who has resigned from Luckin said that frequent hand washing will "rot hands" and "lose fingerprints." In order to ensure the effectiveness of rules and regulations, in addition to regular video surveillance, each brand has also established its own supervision system, and will send special personnel to the store for inspections at irregular intervals every week and month. Once a problem occurs, the punishment is also severe. A former operator of Nayuki's Tea revealed that during his tenure around 2021, if the store had three "red alerts" in terms of customer complaints and food hygiene in a month, the bonuses of the operations manager and the regional general manager would be cancelled.

Gu Ming's prospectus shows that as of September 30, 2023, Gu Ming has a team of more than 360 employees responsible for supervising and auditing the operations and management of franchisees.

In the entire freshly brewed tea beverage operation system, there are some "invisible" jobs. For example, roles such as store managers and regional managers are not only responsible for the daily management of the store, but also have to attend a large number of meetings such as performance review meetings, growth meetings, and learning meetings. An assistant store manager of Heytea said that during her time in the store, her DingTalk would constantly pop up messages about raw material changes, new products, learning tips, etc.

In addition to "shaking milk tea", ordinary employees' physical efforts sometimes include "shouting slogans". "You have to make milk tea with your hands and shout slogans at the same time. If you don't shout, you will be deducted points. After a day's work, you will not only be physically tired, but also have a sore throat." An employee of Cha Yan Yue Se said that the standardized slogans are also written in the work process of the employee manual.

File photo. In September 2022, a shop assistant in a Cha Yan Yue Se store in Wuhan was making milk tea while shouting slogans.

The Manner video exposed the conflicts between store employees and customers. In fact, front-line employees also face a lot of conflicts with riders. An employee of a Mixue Bingcheng franchise store in Hunan revealed that they receive a large number of online takeout orders after lunch on weekdays. Riders have delivery time requirements, but there are only two or three people in the store at this time, so "no matter how hard they try, they can't deliver quickly." When the store system conflicts with the takeout system, conflicts will break out between store employees and riders.

An insider of a food delivery platform revealed that the brand has no targeted regulatory measures for the high volume of food delivery orders during peak hours. On the contrary, the morning peak and afternoon tea time are the golden times for food delivery platforms to promote beverage categories. Food delivery platforms also do not want to miss the opportunity to increase their GMV, so the pressure can only be borne by the store staff.

Do brands or companies know the daily work of frontline employees? This is a "somewhat sensitive" question, and some brands refused our interview. From the prospectuses of Mixue Bingcheng, Shanghai Auntie, Gu Ming, etc., we found descriptions of employee benefits: encouraging employees to explore their hobbies, organizing related activities, advocating gender equality, and providing career development-related training. However, it is not clear whether it has been effectively implemented and whether it can cover all frontline employees of direct stores and franchise stores.

Both Bawang Chaji and Chayan Yuese said that the company has set up corresponding store partner feedback channels, with a dedicated team responsible for collecting the voices of front-line partners, listening to the voices of store employees and responding to related issues. Bawang Chaji has also launched an "recognition encouragement card" mechanism internally to discover the shining points of store employees. Partners who obtain the card can obtain corresponding honor badges and exchange gifts.

However, in interviews with employees, they are more concerned about realistic issues such as "whether they can be promoted", "whether they can get a salary increase", and "whether there are employee welfare packages during the holidays". This is actually a split that exists in all workplace environments. The company has established a corresponding employee care system, but employees are more concerned about the tangible benefits that can be obtained. For grassroots employees, working in a standardized and "results-producing" system, expecting the company to improve the work process from top to bottom and improve "happiness in the store" is actually a more luxurious proposition.

In the “9.9 Yuan” war, labor costs are overly compressed

"Morning, noon and evening shifts" are the most common shifts in freshly made beverage stores. According to interviews, a store clerk spends 9-10 hours a day in the store. The prospectuses and interview results of multiple brands show that the number of people needed for each shift in the store is mostly calculated by the system based on factors such as store traffic and estimated turnover.

However, the system's shift scheduling may not take into account all real-life situations. An employee of a Heytea franchise store revealed that the monthly turnover of his store is less than 200,000 yuan, and the daily turnover is about 4,000 yuan. According to the system calculation, four employees are needed per day. "But it is difficult for four people to take care of it in a day. Not everyone is so skilled, especially when new products are launched and orders are booming." Therefore, the store manager will "intervene" in the results of the system calculation. After three shifts, there will be a total of 7 to 8 employees in the store per day.

The employee said that the plan to increase the number of staff would reduce the salary of each person, but he did not want to accept overly harsh personnel management methods. When the number of orders is "explosive", the number of orders is twice that of normal times. If more staff are not allocated at this time, "it is simply impossible to handle it."

In response to the demand for manpower during peak periods, some brands will also solve the problem of insufficient manpower by asking employees of the next shift to arrive early or hiring part-time workers, while controlling labor costs. Manner stores will release the required part-time time periods according to demand, and part-time employees can choose the store and time to work on the internal mini program according to their own situation. However, part-time employees cannot make drinks, they can only help with cleaning, packing, replenishing supplies, and at most help add ice and sugar. "Drinks cannot be touched." said a part-time clerk at Manner in Shenzhen.

However, brands have different definitions of the scope of "part-time" work. The former manager of a Luckin direct-operated store in Anhui said that in this store, which sells about 400 cups a day and has "good business", he is the only full-time employee, and the others are part-time employees, but part-time employees have the same job responsibilities as full-time employees. This means that brands can achieve the same labor efficiency by hiring part-time employees who do not need to pay five insurances and one housing fund for them.

We have reviewed the prospectuses of multiple brands. Mixue Bingcheng stated that the main costs of ready-made beverage companies include the cost of raw materials, including tea, dairy products, fruit and coffee, as well as labor costs. Among them, labor costs have shown a steady upward trend. Gu Ming and Shanghai Auntie also listed rising labor costs as a risk point for business operations in their prospectuses. On the one hand, there is the rising labor cost, and on the other hand, there is the general trend of "price reduction" and "9.9 marketing". The latter has further pushed brands to find ways to reduce manpower and control costs.

Nayuki's Tea has continued to reduce staff during the store closures due to the epidemic. If there is a "labor shortage" in the store during the peak period, it will borrow staff from other stores to provide support. According to Nayuki's Tea's 2023 financial report, the proportion of labor costs in directly-operated stores will drop from 23.5% in 2022 to 20.3% in 2023.

Luckin Coffee has also adjusted the scheduling system of its directly-operated stores since March this year. While keeping the number of orders the same, it has reduced the number of employees in the store at the same time, and the "early opening" process before the store is now completed by one person.

In all the price cuts and promotions, the costs have not disappeared, but have been transferred in other forms. In terms of supply chain, the supply chain is forced to cut prices and find more cost-effective suppliers. In terms of labor efficiency, this will be reflected in reducing the number of employees in the same store, letting the same employee take on more work, and hiring a large number of part-time employees.

In addition to freshly brewed tea, catering brands such as KFC are actually adopting the same approach. For example, KFC has implemented a project called "Mega" internally, requiring one store manager to manage 3-5 stores across stores; and increasingly using part-time and summer jobs to reduce the labor costs of a single store.

However, some practitioners in the chain restaurant industry said that international chain brands such as KFC and McDonald's are relatively mature in corporate culture building and human resource management, and the headquarters will emphasize the importance of front-line employees. For example, KFC's parent company Yum China internally named its headquarters "Restaurant Support Center". A report in the China-Europe Business Review in 2022 pointed out that every activity designed by KFC headquarters will take into account the difficulty of implementation of front-line partners, "because every instruction will be copied more than 400,000 times."

Franchise stores and directly-operated stores: Different guarantees

When it comes to the development of employees in freshly brewed beverage shops, brands have provided a path for promotion from junior tea drinkers or baristas to store managers and regional managers. However, whether this can be achieved depends not only on whether the employees have the willingness to work and develop in the store for a long time, but also on the implementation of the company in this regard.

What bothered Li Wei, a Heytea employee at a franchise store in a southern city, was that the promotion promised by his boss had not been realized. It took him three months to be promoted from a junior tea blender to a senior tea blender, and he waited for more than a year to be promoted to the next level, but still hadn't gotten it. Li Wei particularly emphasized his identity as a "franchise store employee" and said that "the salary and benefits of the direct-operated stores are better."

According to the interview, salaries, promotions, and whether social security is paid cannot be generalized for franchise stores and direct-operated stores. For example, the direct-operated store employees interviewed during the interview said that according to regulations, they can rest for 6 days a month, but some franchise store employees only have 4 rest days a month; direct-operated stores will pay five insurances and one housing fund for their employees, but franchise stores "vary depending on the boss." As a franchise store employee, Li Wei's company will deduct 300 yuan from his salary every month to pay for social security, while Zhang Yi, who works at a franchise store in a county in the southwest, does not have social security. Zhang Yi also introduced that according to her understanding, direct-operated stores have benefits such as night shift subsidies and holiday gifts, but her franchise store does not have these.

The staff at the Mixue Bingcheng franchise stores told us that they are occasionally required to put on the costumes of the “Snow King” doll to attract customers at the request of the boss.

Bi Guopei, director of the business center of Xinhua Talent Service Group, which has provided third-party human resources services to similar brands such as Cha Li Yi Shi, said that the business models of the ready-made beverage industry are divided into self-operated and franchised. Some operators of some well-known brands had never worked in this field before joining, resulting in a disconnect between the franchise stores and the brand's service concept, corporate culture, and employer brand.

Regarding the issue of franchise stores not paying social security for employees, Huang Xin, a practicing lawyer at Hunan Hongyi Law Firm, said that franchise stores and brand owners have formed two independent legal relationships, and employees of freshly made beverage stores do not have a legal labor relationship with brand owners. In the current economic situation, many franchise store owners will not pay social security for employees in order to save costs, or pay social security for employees only after a certain period of time after joining the company, but this will bring legal risks to their own operations. If employees use legal means to protect their rights, franchise stores may face the risk of closure.

But in the interview, many employees expressed an indifferent attitude towards "not paying social security". Zhang Yi said, "I rarely hear of other companies in the county paying social security." Zhang Yi is 27 years old. The 4,000 yuan salary he gets from working in a milk tea shop is not much different from his previous administrative job, and it is closer to home. Although there are many rules and regulations, "it doesn't require much thinking" and "just be a little slower and more careful."

Occasionally, Zhang Yi can also get some pleasure from the direct results of physical labor, such as receiving good reviews from customers or seeing the heartwarming words written by customers in the notes. However, the high repetitiveness makes her feel that the ceiling of the industry is very low. Zhang Yi does not intend to regard "shaking milk tea" as a long-term choice, but only as a transition.

When asked "Why choose a freshly brewed beverage shop?", we heard answers like: "Compared to other service industries, it's easy and the button-based operation doesn't require grinding coffee liquid", "The salary is a little higher than other part-time jobs", "Because I like to drink milk tea and I think making milk tea is fun", "No one goes to restaurants, but the tea shop business is still good, and I feel that the industry has a good prospect", etc.

However, many employees said that after their experience, they did not plan to develop in this field for a long time. The repetitive labor, physical and mental effort made them think that brewing tea could not be a long-term career choice.

In Bi Guopei's opinion, in the service industry where turnover is generally high, it is indeed relatively easy to recruit people for ready-made beverage shops - the working environment is cleaner than that of restaurants, and the customer base is younger. However, in the golden period of rapid development of chain ready-made beverages in the past 10 years, most brand companies have been unable to meet the requirements of human resources.There is still much room for improvement in the construction of the resource system, especially in the management and control of franchisees.

"Recruiting people is only the first step. Whether we can retain people and provide employees with room for promotion also depends on internal management and organizational culture construction." Bi Guopei also pointed out that the special feature of freshly brewed tea shops is that there are many franchise stores, and each franchisee and each store even has its own "culture", which leads to completely different work experiences of employees in different stores under the same brand.

The implementation of corporate culture is bound to be a long process. To this day, there are still discussions abroad about the working environment and employee salaries of KFC and McDonald's. Freshly brewed tea drinking has quickly established a huge scale in 10 years, and long-term development still requires a breakthrough in the "involution" in products and marketing. The particularity of this industry is that every penny it earns is made by front-line employees one cup at a time.

(At the request of the interviewees, Zhang Yi and Li Wei are pseudonyms in this article)

The copyright of this article belongs to China Business Network.

No reproduction or translation without permission is allowed.

Participate in the 2024 Golden Brand Survey

news

Employees of freshly made beverage shops are in a "difficult situation"

Introduction

my contact information