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In the past ten years, the Shopping Festival has been the most unscrupulous celebration of excessive consumption in China. Now, the light seems to be fading.
It all felt so exciting in the past. I still remember that after another "Double Eleven" shopping festival in the early to mid-2010s, there were long lines on campus to pick up packages. It is winter in Beijing, but the cold November wind cannot cool my classmates’ enthusiasm for all the cheap new things they snapped up.
Last week, when I suddenly remembered that the big day was approaching, I opened Alibaba’s Taobao platform and its main competitor JD.com and found that my shopping cart was empty. This is a vivid visual reminder that something has changed. Have I lost my enthusiasm for Double Eleven?
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm far from the only person who feels this way. On the popular social media platform Douban, a group called "Don't Buy" attracted more than 300,000 members in more than a year. The members are called "anti-consumerists" or more esoteric nicknames "rationalist goose". They post marketing tips and share practical tips to avoid impulse buying, such as how to unfollow live broadcasts or change the color of the shopping app interface to a calmer tone.
To be fair, sales during the holiday season this year continued to rise, with Alibaba reporting sales growth of 8.5% year-on-year. JD.com performed slightly better, with an increase of 29%, but compared to the exciting and recent mid-2010s, even this feels anticlimactic.
How is this going? Why do many people, including me, suddenly lose enthusiasm for a day that once symbolized China's consumption power?
Chinese e-commerce platforms have adopted a more low-key attitude towards this year's shopping festival, partly because of the increasingly stringent scrutiny of their business practices by regulators and what the regulators call a "savage growth" strategy. But if anything, this will only make festivals more important to their future, as platforms are forced to abandon anti-competitive policies that allow them to squeeze merchants. After China's retail industry reported sluggish sales data this summer, even officials have an incentive to maintain their enthusiasm for the festival.
A simple explanation that consumers are not interested in is that we are all tired of platform games. Over the years, many discounts related to festivals have been mere talks. In some cases, they are price increases. For example, although the price is much higher than six months ago, the wireless speakers I am concerned about are listed as sales this year. I think the company may be just an innocent victim of a global chip shortage, but a similar mysterious price spike happens just before every Double Eleven.
At the same time, platforms and merchants are investing larger and larger bets on complex discounts and gamification to encourage shoppers to buy more products. These may be interesting at first, but some of them now feel that they need calculus to figure it out. Not to mention, after more than 10 years, it is difficult for us to ignore all the unnecessary garbage we have accumulated in order to save a little extra money. In my opinion, there are few words in modern Chinese that are more annoying than coudan, or "fill in your bill", a gimmick that requires you to buy relatively cheap items-last year's T-shirt season, you were 12th this year. A pair of socks, or a roll of double-sided tape, you will throw in the closet and forget it until the next time you move-to meet any purchase threshold to get a bigger discount.
Double Eleven consumption is no longer driven by positive emotions such as pleasure and excitement, but by negative emotions such as fear of missing out. -Cai Yineng, editor
Unsurprisingly, all these will generate a lot of unnecessary waste. According to data provided by the State Post Bureau, the state-run Xinhua News Agency estimates that China’s annual parcel delivery volume has surged from 3.67 billion in 2011 to an estimated 95.5 billion this year. According to the State Post Bureau, nearly 5 billion of them will be shipped between November 1st and 11th this year.
In addition to the negative externalities of excessive consumption, there is also the fact that simple consumption behavior itself does not give me the same satisfaction as before. For a long time, one of the main criticisms of Double Eleven has been the need to wait for midnight on November 11 in front of a smartphone or computer screen in order to quickly buy anything you care about, because the company trains consumers to use only available at midnight Or a limited number of "special prices." But in an economy where overtime and endless side jobs have become the norm, it’s hard not to doubt whether it’s really worth sacrificing a person’s sleep, health, and peace of mind in order to save a few hundred dollars.
Perhaps realizing that these midnight snaps will lose their appeal, e-commerce platforms have recently begun to allow customers to set the price of goods by paying deposits in advance. But this is just another sign of an arms race: JD.com has advanced the start time of the specials to 8 pm, and there is now a shopping festival before Double Eleven on November 1. All of this will cause more anxiety, not less, especially as the platform keeps pushing and blinking, you will miss discounts, and merchants will release coupons in small batches to keep customers coming back.
One emotion that is becoming more and more common in online discussions during festivals is helplessness. Double Eleven consumption is no longer driven by positive emotions such as pleasure and excitement, but by negative emotions such as fear of missing out. After all, it is difficult to know whether the prices of Double Eleven are really at their lowest point, but we do know that they will rise afterwards.
This fear-based marketing method encourages the belief that we live in a state of scarcity by default and that only by participating in platform games can we drag ourselves to a fair starting point. This feeling is particularly prominent among Chinese Generation Z, who grew up on the Internet, so they have almost adopted this pessimistic view of the relationship between individuals and large companies. Therefore, it is no wonder that in the past year, they have greeted the country’s severe control of the Internet giants with more applause than boos.
"Don't buy" emoticons from Douban Group. From Douban user "Grass in the Heart", the sixth voice translation
This year, Double Eleven will set more records, at least on paper. However, we still feel that we have reached a turning point. Although the slowdown in sales growth may mark the decline of what was once an important symbol of Chinese consumer power, it does not mean the end of this power. On the contrary, the focus this year seems to be another indicator: sustainability. For example, in October last year, Alibaba’s chief marketing officer Chris Tung stated that the company is shifting its focus from huge sales figures to "sustainable growth."
It seems that there is still some way to go. On the one hand, sustainability requires greater commitment to transparency, better protection of consumers and workers, and greener business practices. Maybe when the time comes, buying yourself a good new thing may inspire happiness again instead of fatigue, anxiety and guilt.
In the end, I kind of missed Double Eleven as an era of simply celebrating cool new things, but it didn't have the day I was looking forward to. November 11 became a cold day in early winter again.
Translator: David Bauer; Editor: Kilian O'Donnell.
(Title picture: Spyker/People's Vision, the sixth tone re-edited)
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