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The average per capita consumption of green tea is 50-60 yuan, which is actually a very awkward price range. This price is slightly more expensive than ordinary fast food, but cheaper than most brands that focus on formal meals.

I saw a news some time ago that Green Tea Restaurant was planning to list on the Hong Kong stock market for the fourth time.

This news brought back a lot of memories for me. When there was no such thing as an Internet celebrity restaurant, Green Tea, Grandma's Home, 57 Degree Hunan, Tanyu and other fast-fashion restaurants were the ones with the longest queues.

When you are a student, these fast fashion restaurants are the best choice for dating and dining. The prices are not high, the style is not bad, and you can chat while waiting for your turn at the door.

So how did this group of "fast fashion restaurants" reach their peak and why did they gradually decline?

01

"Fast fashion" is a concept in the clothing field, referring to a business model that achieves low prices and low inventory goals through small-scale production, diverse styles, and high-frequency new product launches.

In the catering industry, at a certain period of time, a group of chain restaurants with similar characteristics emerged.

Green tea is the most representative one among them.

In 2004, Hangzhou was not yet the e-commerce city it is today, and its biggest business card was still tourism rather than the Internet.

Wang Qinsong, a native of Shaoxing, and his wife Lu Changmei opened a youth hostel at No. 31 Lingyin Road in Hangzhou. Not only is this place located in the West Lake scenic area, it was also once the holy land of rock music in Hangzhou. In that era when backpacker culture was popular among the literary youth group, this youth hostel business was booming.

Because there is a Longjing tea garden in front of the hotel, it is named "Green Tea Youth Hostel".

Wang Qinsong worked as a chef in his early years, so in addition to providing accommodation, he also provides catering services to guests.

Taking into account that backpackers travel all over the country and have different tastes, and that young hipsters generally don't have much money, the couple decided to develop fusion dishes based on Hangzhou cuisine to satisfy customers' tastes, and the prices must be affordable.

In the early 2000s, there were only a handful of restaurants in Hangzhou that served fusion cuisine. The couple's restaurant quickly attracted a group of local diners, with more people eating than staying. Later, the Youth Hostel was demolished, so the couple decided to just open a restaurant.

In 2008, the first green tea shop was opened.

The era when Green Tea was founded coincided with the era when the theme of China's catering market was changing.

If we divide the catering industry into high-end catering and citizen catering, then from the 1990s to the 2000s, high-end catering was the main theme of Chinese catering.

At that time, it was not so common for ordinary citizens to eat out. Entertaining guests, festive gatherings, and business banquets were very important scenes.

The big players in the market at that time were Xiang-E Qing, founded in the 1990s, Golden Leopard, founded in 2003, South Beauty, founded by Zhang Lan in Beijing in 2000, Jingya Hotel, born in Weihai, as well as Xiao Nan Guo and Suzhe Hui.

It can be said that this was an era when high-end catering was the norm.

It was not until around 2010 that the urban middle class gradually awakened to consumption as the wealth and income of Chinese urban residents increased. At that time, the only restaurants that met the consumption standards of the urban middle class were small street shops and fly restaurants.

The rise of fast fashion catering just hit this point.

02

So, why are these fast fashion restaurants called "fast fashion"? How are they comparable to Zara and Uniqlo?

In my opinion, the disruptive nature of fast fashion dining lies not in the food itself, but in the environment and service.

Before 2010, a more upscale dining environment and relatively thoughtful service were not so common.

The reason why fast fashion restaurants have become popular is that they provide a well-decorated environment and standardized services at a relatively affordable price.

According to media statistics, the average price per person for the wave of catering brands that emerged after 2010 is generally around 50 to 60 yuan.

However, the decoration costs are generally high. For example, it was reported in 2014 that the average decoration cost of each Green Tea restaurant was as high as 5 million yuan. Many traditional brands with average customer spending three times that of Green Tea had decoration costs lower than Green Tea.

This is the same logic as fast fashion clothing. Brands like Zara became successful because they allowed customers to spend just a few hundred yuan to buy big-name designs worth thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan.

But it is not easy to achieve this. After all, everyone opens a restaurant to make money. If the prices are so low and the costs are so high, how can they make a profit?

The answer comes from the "fast" of fast fashion.

The speed of fast fashion clothing is reflected in the fact that there are many styles, low production, and frequent new products. Behind this is an efficient supply chain system, where store data is connected with production links. This small order and fast return model avoids the most fatal cost item in the clothing industry: high inventory.

The speed of the catering industry is reflected in the high turnover rate.

Because of the low average customer spending, fast-fashion restaurants may need to have twice as many tables turned over per day as other restaurants. In 2014, during Green Tea’s heyday, it created a “table turnover myth” of 6 to 8 times on average, with the Hangzhou headquarters reaching 12 to 14 times.

High table turnover rate can be simply understood as the superposition of two factors:

The dining time for each table of customers is shorter, and there is a steady stream of customers to follow.

If you want customers to finish their meals quickly, there are many detailed operational techniques you can use.

For example, when setting up tables and chairs, use more small square tables suitable for two people to dine. This way, you can always create four seats, and avoid one or two people eating at a four-person table, leaving seats empty. It is also best to use high chairs and low tables to avoid customers feeling slightly uncomfortable and prevent them from staying.

For example, when ordering, you should help customers make decisions as quickly as possible. If you can use a piece of paper to make a menu, don't make it a book. If you can start ordering while waiting for a table, don't let customers order after they sit down. The menu should be detailed and concise, and the key ingredients and flavor characteristics of each dish should be marked. Several fixed set meals should be designed, and the waiters should be able to recommend and encourage customers to order more individual signature dishes. This can not only speed up the kitchen's production, but also reduce costs.

For example, during a meal, while customers are eating, the waiter should start collecting empty plates. When customers finish eating, the table should be cleared immediately. This can speed up the dining pace and increase the turnover rate. In addition, customers often chat for a while after eating, so the waiter should follow up in time, actively refill water for customers, and ask if they want more dishes. It seems to be a thoughtful service, but it actually interrupts the conversation and makes customers want to leave.

In short, restaurant service is the art of controlling rhythm. By designing good rules and providing good employee training, you can serve customers in a way that makes them feel like spring breeze.

Now that customers’ dining time is shortened, we need to consider how to increase the number of customers.

The first is what we mentioned earlier, low price.

When I talk about low-price businesses, I often mention a term called "performing cheapness", which means that merchants use some means to make a one-dollar price reduction have the effect of a hundred-dollar price reduction.

There is a similar technique in the catering industry, which is to design traffic-generating items.

The product that attracts customers must be very cost-effective, even unreasonably cheap, such as the 3 yuan portion of Mapo Tofu at Waipojia, the 5 yuan smashed cucumber at Green Tea Restaurant, the 10 yuan Dongpo pork and the 17 yuan steak.

Their existence actually serves a marketing purpose.

Green Tea Grandma's Restaurant has an average customer spending of 50-60 yuan per person, which is already considered an affordable restaurant. But in order to make users feel that it is "affordable", some memorable points must be designed. These high-cost-effective traffic-generating items play a role in strengthening cognition.

03

Another way to attract traffic is to look at it in the context of the times.

Shopping malls started very early in China. In 1996, Guangzhou Tee City Plaza was completed and China officially entered the shopping mall era.

However, shopping malls did not really begin to experience rapid development until after 2010. Data shows that from 2011 to 2021, the stock area of ​​China's shopping malls soared from less than 100 million square meters to nearly 500 million square meters. Before 2018, the growth rate had been above 20%.

Unlike the "buy goods-sell goods" logic of traditional department stores, shopping malls are essentially landlord businesses, so they tend to have multiple business formats coexist. In the brand configuration of shopping malls, retail brands are mainly responsible for paying rent and supporting the storefront, while catering and entertainment play a role in attracting customers.

The explosion of shopping malls means that a large number of vacant shops have appeared at once, requiring catering brands to move in.

Taking advantage of this wave of mall-building movement, fast fashion restaurant brands opened a large number of stores on the fourth and fifth floors of shopping malls. They not only enjoyed the rent reductions given to them by the shopping malls, but also became the beneficiaries of the last golden age of offline business during the most prosperous period of the shopping malls, and attracted a large number of customers.

Every weekend, young people who come shopping, audiences who go to the movies, parents who send their children to education and training classes, and white-collar workers who work in office buildings near shopping malls may stop by for a meal at a restaurant like Green Tea.

It is this constant flow of customers that supports the extremely high turnover rate of fast fashion restaurants, allowing them to achieve their "fast" goal.

In fact, the rise of fast fashion clothing in China has also benefited from the explosion of shopping malls. Brands such as Uniqlo, Zara, and UR are still standard investment brands in many mid-range shopping malls.

To some extent, this is also intertextual with the trends in the catering industry.

04

At this point, we can understand that behind the five words "fast fashion catering" actually represent the development trend of the Chinese catering market, which is the pursuit of increasingly extreme efficiency.

Some obvious phenomena are that pre-prepared meals are being used on an increasingly large scale in the catering industry, brands are increasingly relying on franchise models for expansion, stores are increasingly advocating big single product and big marketing strategies, hot pot and barbecue categories dominate the catering market, small, short-term and fast restaurants are increasingly favored by the market, and technologies represented by online ordering and cooking robots are gradually replacing manpower.

Over the past decade, China's catering market has completed a revolution of efficiency first.

Green tea is both the pioneer and the object of this revolution.

Its worship of efficiency eventually exceeded its capabilities and ultimately destroyed itself.

For example, Green Tea started out by making fusion cuisine, which has Hangzhou cuisine as its base, as well as Cantonese desserts and bread temptations, Sichuan and Hunan cuisine such as chopped pepper fish head and Maoxuewang, and common cheese dishes in Western cuisine.

But it is difficult to achieve extreme efficiency in fusion cuisine.

Users need to have a memorable point for a restaurant. It is best if they can immediately say when the restaurant's name is mentioned: such and such restaurant serves such and such cuisine. Fusion cuisine emphasizes a variety of dishes, and the degree of labeling is not enough.

Then, fusion restaurants often have many dishes, and some dishes cannot be absent from the menu even though they do not sell well. Compared with specialty restaurants that only sell one item, such as grilled fish, coconut chicken, or crayfish, it is difficult to maximize the supply chain efficiency.

As a result, consumers were the first to abandon fusion cuisine.

In addition, today's catering industry focuses on economies of scale, and the more stores the better, so the dependence on franchisees is also high. Green Tea's delay in opening franchisees, coupled with heavy investments in store decoration, is also not in line with the current trend.

In fact, compared with the large restaurants on the fourth and fifth floors of shopping malls, current catering capital is increasingly favoring small restaurants like those on B1 of shopping malls.These brands have small stores, low labor costs, short product lines, high standardization, and high food delivery efficiency. Once launched, they can be quickly replicated and quickly occupy the market. Large stores like Green Tea, which are hundreds of square meters, do not have enough advantages in terms of capital utilization efficiency.

05

Finally, we have to talk about the problems of green tea itself.

It just doesn’t taste good.

I think Green Tea's food quality was pretty good around 2010. At least for those of us who were born in the late 80s and early 90s and were just starting out or still studying, we didn't have that many good ones when we were young, so Green Tea's quality was pretty good.

But in the 2020s, not to mention that competition is more intense, young consumers are also a generation that has seen and eaten. At this time, if you still offer the same old three things, such as barbecue, grilled chicken, and bread, it will be a bit disappointing.

Besides, Green Tea has not figured out its own positioning.

The average per capita consumption of green tea is 50-60 yuan, which is actually a very awkward price range. This price is slightly more expensive than ordinary fast food, but cheaper than most brands that focus on formal meals.

The price of food and beverage determines the dining scene, whether it is for one person or for a date. This positioning is just not as good as Saizeriya and not as good as Haidilao.

After all, fast fashion catering is just a stage in the historical development of Chinese catering.

In this wave, some have successfully transformed and evolved. For example, Jiu Mao Jiu has kept up with the times and renewed its life with its two brands, Tai Er Pickled Fish and Shuang Hotpot. Another example is Xibei, which is becoming more and more expensive, but has made a lot of money by fully embracing pre-prepared meals and entering the children's meal market.

At the same time, a number of brands have gradually fallen behind and been forgotten.

What about Green Tea? It has not developed as expected, but there are still 300 to 400 stores across the country. Sometimes when colleagues in the department order takeout together, they will choose to order Green Tea together.

It has also tried to transform itself, and once made an effort to launch hundreds of new products a year, and also created several sub-brands, but after several rounds of efforts, it found that only the main brand was still the most popular.

It is no longer an Internet-famous restaurant and seems a little outdated to many young people, but many people still remember it and its tempting bread, barbecue and green tea cakes.

It is still trying hard to go public and has even tried four times, but everyone knows what the capital market's attitude is towards the catering industry, which has no moat and is plagued by severe internal competition.

I sometimes think that a brand of an era will present the temperament of that era. What restaurants like Green Tea are facing is actually like a middle-aged problem.

It has experienced an era of gold everywhere, and was fortunate enough to participate in it, and was even one of the few people who caught the bonus. It has also made rapid progress, but the capital accumulated is not enough to allow it to transition to the next version smoothly. Just like when it was young, it still needs to rely on rolling to make a living.

The problem is that its opponents have changed. In the past, its business strategy was always successful in the face of high-end restaurants and street stalls. However, today, newcomers have opened thousands of stores, Internet celebrity products have emerged one after another, and the supply chain has been stretched to the extreme. Every method that it used to be proud of is played better by younger people.

I want to transform, but I draw my sword and look around, feeling lost. I want to go ashore, but the future is uncertain and my hair is gray.

The only way is to survive, to survive by any means, to wait for the next cycle, the next high tide. As long as you don't go bankrupt, you will have a chance to make a comeback.

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