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Original first release | Jinjiao Finance (ID: F-Jinjiao)

Author | Ying Bao

If you are over 25, you are not even eligible to enter HEYTEA Shaken Milk Tea.

Under the hot search topic #A Heytea store in Shenzhen refuses to hire employees over 25 years old#, a netizen broke the news that,The recruitment age of a Heytea store in Shenzhen was set between 18 and 25 years old, so I, at the age of 28, was rejected for being "too old".According to the store’s recruitment manager, the “25-year-old limit” is because the store’s employees are relatively young.

Netizens have different opinions on this matter. Some people think that Heytea stores are considering a younger customer base, and younger employees can narrow the distance with customers and build a young corporate culture. But the clerk’s job is not to chat with customers, and there is not much difference between a 25-year-old and a 30-year-old in communication and thinking. The real reason for the "25-year-old card" may be as another point of view says:"We just want to find strong and cheap cattle and horses." After all, the salary difference between a 25-year-old and a 30-year-old is huge.

It is a common phenomenon in the tea industry to only recruit young people and offer low wages.Tea companies are spending money on price wars, which seems to benefit consumers, but in fact it is more likely that "every cup of 9.9 yuan milk tea you drink is exploiting young people"; and young people who choose to go into the store to shake milk tea are like working in a factory to screw screws.

History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes.The tea beverage industry, which is under internal competition, is becoming more and more like another "Foxconn".

Only young people can endure the bitterness of Heytea

It’s not just the Heytea store in Shenzhen that’s setting an age limit.

According to Heytea’s recruitment information, the age requirement for store clerks in Beijing is 18-35 years old, and the age requirement for duty managers and tea blenders in Shanghai Chongming store is 18-29 years old.

In addition to frontline employees, at the beginning of this year, it was also revealed that the age limit for management positions at Heytea headquarters was set at 25-30 years old, for example, the e-commerce distribution supervisor position required 3-5 years of work experience. This caused netizens to joke: "Undergraduate graduates who have worked for 3-5 years can just get into Heytea, while those with master's degrees have no chance at all."

More realistically, Heytea sets the upper age limit at 25, which means that it actually recruits people in their 20s, and it has already recruited a large number of them. As of February 2024, Heytea has more than 10,000 bartenders on duty, mostly those born after 1995, with an average age of 23.8 years old, of which 20% have bachelor's degrees and 42% have junior college degrees.

Young people are recruited to take on high-intensity work.

According to HEYTEA data, by the end of 2023, HEYTEA's succulent grapes had sold a total of 150 million cups; in 2023, among the business partner stores with a main area of ​​50-89 square meters,The highest sales volume in a single store in a single day exceeded 5,300 cups. These thousands or even hundreds of millions of cups of tea were all made by the store staff with their own hands.

A reporter once said after experiencing "one-day clerk" at the Heytea store in Beijing Joy City that just the job of putting lids on cups requires a certain amount of brain capacity, because there are 8 kinds of cup lids in the product line, and different tea drinks need different lids - hot drinks need black lids, and 700ml large cups of smoothies need transparent semi-circular lids... If you are slow to put lids on or put them on incorrectly, you may be complained by customers. In the packaging process, the clerks also need to memorize more than a dozen matching formulas derived from 5 kinds of packaging bags and 4 kinds of straws.

The work in the kitchen is not easy either. Grapes have to be peeled manually one by one, and each person peels five or six large basins a day. Mulberries, bayberries and other fruits that are calculated in "frames" are also processed manually. Washing the fruits is only the first step, and there are other steps such as cooking small ingredients, washing fruits, and making tea.

But the most arduous work is still the mixing of drinks, which includes preparing ingredients, adding ingredients to the cup, mixing tea, making cups, adding cheese, etc. A clerk working at the Shanghai Disney Heytea store said,During peak hours, bartenders have to prepare nearly 1,000 cups per hour, and 5,000 cups per day is the norm, so they need to ensure that the mix is ​​correct and the food is served at the speed of light. To ensure the order capacity, the staff often need to work from 9 am to 9 pm.

At the beginning of 2024, a netizen launched a questionnaire survey for Heytea employees. The results showed that only 39% of the employees interviewed said they could leave work on time, 43% often or occasionally left work late, and 18% chose "often left work very late." Among the employees interviewed, even those with the rank of "store manager" could not escape the fact that "the latest they have to leave work is about 12 o'clock, and if they open the store, they will start work at about 8 o'clock."

However, the salary does not match the high intensity and long working hours.

A former employee of a Heytea store in Jinan said in an interview that employees of the store will undergo two months of training before taking up their posts, and their monthly salary will be more than 6,000 yuan after becoming regular employees. Compared with the local average salary and housing expenses, this salary can only be considered as a medium-to-low level. The "China Enterprise Recruitment Salary Report" in the second quarter of 2024 shows that the average monthly salary in Jinan is 9,561 yuan and the average rent is 1,500 yuan/month.

The wages at franchise stores are even lower. An employee of a franchise store in Changsha said that he only earns 4,000 yuan a month and does not receive any on-the-job training.According to media reports, Heytea's average salary is 7,485 yuan per month, but 33% of its employees earn 4,000-6,000 yuan per month.

No wonder Heytea wants to recruit young people, as the "older people" over 25 years old can't bear this kind of hardship. Even when netizens are making jokes, the main theme cannot be avoided without mentioning young people:

"Every cup of 9.9 yuan milk tea you drink is exploiting young people."

Industry common problems

Ironically, HeyteaThis kind of "exploitation" is so common in the new tea beverage industry that similar news no longer stirs up public opinion.

In July 2024, Luckin Coffee was exposed for "disliking" a 26-year-old applicant because he was too old. The store manager said during the interview that he needed young and energetic people and was afraid that (older people) would have a generation gap in conversations with the crowd. The beautiful age of 26 is also considered "old" in Mixue Ice City. In November 2023, Mixue Ice City was accused of using age as a factor in recruiting store employees in many stores.

In June 2024, conflicts broke out between staff and customers in three consecutive Manner Coffee stores, including baristas and customers slapping each other. The superficial cause of the three incidents was "staff losing control of their emotions", and the underlying cause was Manner Coffee's exploitation of its employees.

Media reports show that Manner Coffee stores with daily revenue of less than 5,000 yuan only have one clerk. Calculated at an average price of 20 yuan per cup, the 5,000 yuan revenue target corresponds to 250 cups of coffee. Assuming that a barista works 10 hours a day, that means 25 cups of coffee per hour, while Starbucks averages 12 cups per hour per clerk. This does not include cleaning, packaging and other work.

According to a Manner barista, even in first-tier cities, the monthly salary of a Manner barista is only about 5,000 yuan, and the internship salary is only 4,000 yuan. The working hours are usually from 7 am to 10 pm. At the same time, being late or taking personal leave will result in a deduction of 1,000 yuan in full attendance bonus.

When this type of news first comes out, netizens will argue in the comment section, saying "I'm furious" and "I won't drink from his restaurant anymore", but they will eventually fall silent.Employment discrimination and exploitation in the industry will not disappear overnight, because from the perspective of the enterprise, it must first expand internal resources before it has the capital to expand the market.

Looking at the new tea market, the scale is still growing. According to the forecast of China Insights Consulting, the annual per capita consumption of freshly brewed tea in China will increase from about 9 cups in 2022 to about 26 cups in 2028; the retail sales of freshly brewed tea shops will increase from 168 billion yuan in 2022 to 531.9 billion yuan in 2028.

Unfortunately, there are too many competitors and no matter how big the cake is, there is not enough to share.The 2023 New Tea Drink Research Report shows that from March to June 2023, the new SPUs of Meituan Takeaway's leading new tea drink brands were 9,200, 9,100, 8,600 and 8,300 respectively, while in the same period of 2022 they were 7,200, 7,600, 7,900 and 7,800 respectively. This will inevitably lead to a large number of brands becoming bubbles. GeoQ Data data shows that in the first half of 2024, the number of new stores opened by 101 chain new tea drink brands was the same as the same period last year, but the number of closed stores increased by nearly 3,000.

New tea beverage companies have all embarked on the path of self-rescue through homogenization - spending money on price wars and marketing wars.But with the backlash of the price war at the beginning of this year, the marketing war has become ineffective.A social survey report released by DT Business Observer shows that by the end of 2023, people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with this. Only 33.1% of consumers said that they are more interested in co-branding than before. Even when faced with a co-branding that they are slightly interested in, 55.3% of people will only "buy it at random", and 8.8% of people even said "just take a look".

Compared with Luckin Coffee and Moutai’s sauce-flavored latte, which “sold over 5.42 million cups on the first day”, Heytea’s three joint results in 2023 are far from that - “sold 3 million cups in 3 days” in collaboration with the game “Genshin Impact”, “sold 1.5 million cups in 3 days” in collaboration with FENDI, and “sold 600,000 cups in 3 days” in collaboration with “The King of Comedy Movie”.

at the same time,Price wars and marketing wars have changed the strategies and business models of various brands, from different selling points and misaligned pricing to a consistent low-price and high-volume model. Now when brands find that this road is not feasible, they can no longer turn back, as the barriers to innovation have long disappeared in the internal circulation.

Starting from the second half of last year,At the same time as the market's "de-bubble" process was being upgraded, the behavior of "rolling employees" also occurred frequently.

Another Foxconn

A phenomenon that contradicts exploitation is that the catering service industry has long had difficulty hiring workers.

This phenomenon began to be widely discussed in 2019. In the "most in-demand" occupation rankings released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security that year, catering service personnel ranked in the top 10. Until 2023, people were still discussing solutions. For example, in February of the same year, the China Hotel Association suggested adding flexible positions such as hourly workers, temporary workers, and part-time positions to increase the attractiveness of catering employment.

Why do companies that are able to continuously recruit young people in their early 20s still have difficulty hiring workers?This points to a common problem in the catering industry and its subordinate new tea beverage industry - high turnover rate.

A tea shop manager once told the media that the normal career growth trajectory of an employee should be from bar clerk to trainer, acting store manager, and store manager, which takes at least 1 year and at most 3 years. Even the simplest tea blender needs 1-2 months of training to be able to produce standard products. But the reality is that some new tea brands do not have a standardized employee training mechanism. For example, the above-mentioned Manner Coffee used to arrange a 2-week off-the-job training for new employees. With the worsening shortage of staff, new employees are now directly hired to the store for training.

In this case, let alone promoting corporate culture and cultivating employees' awareness of maintaining corporate brand interests,It is a common phenomenon that front-line employees of new tea beverage companies have weak cohesion - on a deeper level, this is due to the companies' negligence in talent training and reserve.The Daily Economic News once pointed out a common problem in the industry: excessive pursuit of labor efficiency. This is due to the fact that most tea beverage companies only regard their employees as "emotionless machines."

From the perspective of the store clerks, this phenomenon means that there are narrow channels for learning and promotion, and there is no sense of belonging. In addition, the low salary, long working hours, and monotonous and boring work content lead young people to only regard tea shop work as a transition and leave after working for a year or two. According to data reported by the "China Beverage Express", the turnover rate of employees in the catering service industry is 30% after working for one month, and the turnover rate is 70% after working for three months. There are only a handful of employees who have worked in many restaurants for more than one year. Even in large platforms such as Haidilao with good benefits, less than 40% of employees have been employed for more than one year. In the tea industry, surveys show that the turnover rate of some tea shops is as high as 200%.

Both businesses and young people have entered a vicious circle.Companies exploit their employees and neglect to train and build a core talent pool, resulting in a high employee turnover rate. The companies can only continuously lower the age of recruitment and rely solely on young labor to create profits. Young people cannot stay in the job for long and their personal abilities are not improved, so they can only stay in the same job and at the same level.

This scene looks familiar—The new tea beverage industry is becoming another "Foxconn".

There are many discussions online about "why people go to work in tea shops", and one reason is mentioned repeatedly: when you are 18 or 19 years old and just entering society, you have no skills and can't find a good job. You also think that factories are too dirty, tiring and boring. You feel that tea shops have air conditioning and unlimited milk tea, so it would be more comfortable to work. Looking at the comparison, it's just like going from one assembly line to another.

How far can this "assembly line model that consumes young people" allow new tea beverage companies to go?

References:

China News Service, "One-day store visit | Are milk tea shops so popular?"

Power Plant "Quality decline, service reduction, Heytea and Nayuki's "downward" business is not doing well"

Hydrogen consumption "Unseemly Manners are squeezing money from their employees"