A major incident just broke out, both inside and outside the Great Firewall are in an uproar, screenshots are out and everyone is speechless!? The most authentic sharing after being unemployed at 37! Qiqi Baba TALK Episode 1024 20261108

This episode consists of clips shared and edited by host Qiqi and netizens. First, it discusses the incident where a Chinese delivery driver in Australia died after fighting a homeless person due to HungryPanda's compensation policy for lost or damaged orders, criticizing the exploitative logic of Chinese companies going global that do not treat employees as human beings. Next, it shares the true state of mind of a 37-year-old unemployed man in Shenyang who, after experiencing job hunting difficulties and the internal friction of private enterprises, decided to quit and plans to learn to be a chef. Finally, it explores the phenomenon of a large number of closures and transfers in China's hair and beauty industry within ninety days, analyzing the reasons for merchants' deceptive membership card schemes and failed transformations.

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Hello everyone, welcome to Qiqi Baba. Something very heartbreaking and regrettable happened recently: a Chinese delivery driver in Australia passed away in an accident.

It was a Chinese delivery driver for HungryPanda in Australia. In order to defend the delivery order, when a homeless person tried to rob him, he was unwilling to give it up, which resulted in the homeless person attacking him with a knife, and he died. Why would the delivery driver risk his life to protect the food? Because the platform has a rule: if the delivered food is lost or damaged, the delivery person is required to pay for it. That is why he was unwilling to give up at the first moment and chose to fight back.

We all know that most foreign companies have addressed this issue in their employee handbooks. If a robbery occurs in a store, employees must prioritize their own safety and must never try to subdue the perpetrator or stop their violent behavior. And I have never heard of employees being required to pay for stolen items. Later, HungryPanda came out and said, "Oh, we don't require the delivery driver to pay for the stolen food." But there are internal chat records from HungryPanda delivery drivers that prove otherwise—they do have to pay. Whether it is stolen or robbed, they have to pay. So, why do Chinese companies that go overseas hire mostly Chinese people? Why is that? It's a very strange phenomenon, right?

Moreover, most of the people they hire are first-generation immigrants, meaning they grew up in China for the first half of their lives and only came abroad later. They are not Chinese people born and raised abroad. It is also difficult for them to hire others because they still follow the logic of not treating people as human beings. They are always thinking about exploiting loopholes in local laws, trying every possible way to squeeze more out of Chinese employees, and they are certain that Chinese employees will not use legal weapons to defend their rights.

So, they bully them severely. At the root, in their psychology, they still do not treat people as human beings. Even if they are suppressed by the law and cannot be as blatant or excessive as they are in China, in reality, they still do not treat employees as human beings from the bottom of their hearts. It is still the same logic brought out from China; it will not change at the root. They have not shifted this mindset, so their policies or regulations will make people feel exploited.

Ah, besides Chinese people and some immigrants from the Third World who are having a particularly hard time, people who grew up normally in developed countries—no matter what race they are—just can't stand it. And they would feel that this already violates the rules, meaning they might actually report you. Someone also left a comment saying, you know, instead of blaming the murderer, instead of blaming the government for causing a flood of homeless people, instead of blaming poor management, they instead blame the platform that gave him a job.

I really, I can only say, learn to respect people, learn to treat yourself like a human being, which means treating others like human beings. If you don't treat yourself like a human being, even if we forget about that for a second, can you at least treat yourself like a human being first? If you were this delivery driver, and you weren't treated like a human being like this, would you still be singing the praises of this platform? Are you working on your knees? Is it like you weren't making money for them or something? You are in a cooperative relationship, an equal one, can you understand that? I really feel like this is the first lesson most Chinese people need to learn, truly the first lesson.

I am 37 this year, and I lost my job at the beginning of this year. When I first lost my job, I wasn't anxious at all. I had been working for 15 years, and I figured I had about a decade of work experience, I'm a guy who can talk a good game, so finding a job casually would be a breeze. At the beginning, I messed around for half a year, playing until September. Around September, I couldn't really play anymore—to what extent? Every night when I came home, I opened my computer, wanting to play games, but I didn't even know what to play. Then I figured it was time, let me find a job. I just never expected a job could be this hard to find, in all of Shenyang.

Aside from telemarketing—whether it's insurance telemarketing, selling courses via telemarketing, or selling real estate via telemarketing—besides these three, basically no place even gave me a chance for an interview. Once they saw my age, they stopped contacting me. Later, a few days ago, a group company in Shenyang, uh, actually gave me a chance to go for an interview, for a reserve management position, so I went. Hey, it was pretty good, I actually passed the interview. They were taking in a batch of about a hundred people, it's a pretty big group company, so I went in. Even though it started as a reserve management position, you have to start from the grass-roots level.

Uh, it was pretty tiring at first, but the atmosphere was actually quite good, and I quite liked it. After working there for a little over a week, I decided starting today, no, I can't keep doing this, I have to resign. Why? Because a few days ago, chatting with these young people in their early twenties, 24 or 24, 25, I could see that kind of innocence and longing for the future in their eyes—I could see that kind of innocence and longing for the future in their eyes. It's just that I, too, came out of this kind of group company, and I understand this situation particularly well. What can I learn here? Huh? Learning all kinds of spreadsheets, all kinds of management, all kinds of PPT making, including...

How to fool superiors? If I were also 27 or 28 today, then I would be willing to stay here, I would be willing to stay here and learn for five years, then jump ship to somewhere else. But I'm 37, and I deeply understand that no company will let me work until retirement. Especially this kind of private enterprise, it's impossible for them to let me work until retirement. If I waste another three or five years here, I'll be 42, 43, and when I come out again, the only choices I might face are courier delivery, food delivery, and security guard. Although right now, uh, it's also these three choices anyway.

However, it's that feeling, you know—when you don't have a job, you feel a bit anxious, thinking I need to find a place to work and make money. Once you have a job? You realize you can't go on working like this; if I keep working, I'm going to be ruined. It's just too agonizing. You tell me now, I want to learn something, learn a craft, but I still don't know what to learn.

I'm going to my mom's place for dinner in a while, my mom cooks exceptionally well. Right now, I'm researching whether I should seriously learn how to cook from my mom. I think, I think, I want to be a chef. Why do I want to be a chef? I feel that the future trend of development, uh, with this AI development, later on, there will definitely be pre-prepared meals everywhere, but those pre-prepared meals certainly won't taste as good as what someone makes. If I can cook this food well, even if I'm a bit tired and making hard-earned money, at least I can scrape by to support my family. I can cook when I'm 50, I can cook when I'm 60, I can cook when I'm 70. Hey, that's just this simple idea.

In the first three months of this year, 213,000 hair salons across the country were deregistered, closed, or transferred. Ninety days, 210,000 shops—over 2,300 shops a day. You get a haircut, it takes forty minutes, and in just that amount of time, more than sixty shops pulled down their rolling shutters; this is according to data from the China Hairdressing and Beauty Association. Over the same period, 127,000 new shops opened. One in, one out, a net loss of 86,000. Yet on the exact same street, 10-yuan quick-cut shops—where they don't wash hair, don't push sales, and don't sell membership cards—have lines forming outside. Lines form in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen too, and more than half of the people in those lines are young office workers. Queuing to close down while queuing for a haircut—now that makes things interesting.

E-commerce has been fighting for so many years, wiping out a whole batch of physical stores, but hair salons have always been the toughest nut to crack. You can't trim someone's bangs through a screen, right? Yet they managed to take themselves down. How did they do it? Four knives. The first knife: titles, before you even step inside.

You sit down and take an exam first: ordinary stylist, design director, chief store manager—which one will you choose? The exact same master was an ordinary stylist last month and a technical director this month. The title changed, but the hands didn't. Some shops are even more direct: 30 yuan for ordinary, 40 for senior, 50 for manager, 65 for director, 80 for senior director. If you choose the 30-yuan one, they make you wait. Say you want to switch to a director, and someone comes over immediately. Whether that director is the exact same person as the 30-yuan guy from a moment ago is anyone's guess.

The second knife: membership cards. The moment you lie down to wash your hair, they ask: do you want ordinary or premium shampoo? Halfway through the haircut, they start pushing membership cards. When you're getting a haircut, people are sitting so close together you have nowhere to hide; someone's face is right next to your ear, repeating over and over: top up 2,000 and get 800 free, top up 3,000 and get 1,500 free. The moment you say you aren't buying a card, their expression changes on the spot. The rest of the haircut is perfunctory to a painfully obvious degree. And for those who still have money left on their card...

When there are 88 yuan left, not enough for a haircut, you have to top up another 50. They figured out this math long ago. In consumer complaints regarding prepaid cards, the beauty and hair salon industry ranks near the top. Once a shop closes down, who do you ask for the money left on your card? A piece of paper is pasted on the door: shop under renovation, stay tuned. Stay tuned for what?

第三刀 (The third knife: pricing), a guy gets a haircut for 78 yuan, and the staff member acts quite aggrieved, claiming this is the discounted price of 78 yuan—enough to buy a pair of hair clippers. Search men's haircuts on Douyin, and you'll find a three-minute tutorial: clippers come with a limit comb, you just snap it on and push it across the head, impossible to mess up. During those three years of pandemic lockdowns, how many people had their wives give them a buzz cut at home, only to realize the job wasn't that mysterious after all? A regular customer who had been getting his hair cut at a shop for ten years saw the price go from 38 to 68, and then up to 138, with no room for bargaining. He didn't argue or make a fuss; he simply went out and bought a pair of clippers. Just like that, a ten-year regular customer was gone. The fourth knife.

People, take a look at the signboards nowadays. Old-school hair salons were called public barbershops or convenience barbershops; now, if they aren't called styling studios, they have to have some foreign name. The word "public" is gone, "convenience" is gone, and even the word "haircut" is gone. In an ordinary residential area, a haircut costing 15 to 20 yuan used to be the norm, but some shops that open there start their basic package at 88 yuan. They haven't figured out why on earth anyone on this street would spend 88 yuan on a haircut.

Why are 10-yuan quick-cut shops so popular? No hair washing, no blow-drying, no chatting; scan the QR code to get a number, sit down and get clipped, five minutes per person, turning over dozens of customers a day. As for the big shops, they can barely get a few haircuts done in a day because the rest of the time is spent pushing cards. When customer numbers drop, they raise prices; when prices go up, customer numbers drop even further; and with fewer customers, they have to push cards even harder. This isn't running a business; this is putting a noose around your own neck.

So if you want to ask how those 210,000 shops vanished, it's not because people stopped getting haircuts. It's because someone turned the act of getting a haircut into something else: selling titles, selling cards, selling packages, selling that feeling of shrinking the moment you walk through the door.

Some people speak up for this industry, saying rent went up. Quick-cut shops don't pay rent? They are in the same city too, they rent spaces and pay for utilities just like anyone else. Some say people aren't spending money anymore, yet lines for 10-yuan haircuts stretch out the door—how can you say nobody is spending money? Others mention the impact of e-commerce, but can e-commerce trim your bangs through a screen? No. But you taught people how to cut their own hair at home—that is the most fatal part.

You spent ten years telling customers over and over that this job is very simple, and that what's expensive is the service. The customers believed it, and then went home and did it themselves. Therefore, the real competitors of this industry were never quick-cut shops or e-commerce; it was their own price list.

Let's talk about these shutdowns: who is footing the bill? It's not the boss. The boss closes the shop and walks away, losing at most some decoration money before opening another shop in a different city. It's the people who bought cards, whose cards still have hundreds or thousands of yuan left on them while the people are nowhere to be found. It's the junior staff and apprentices in the shops.

Once a shop closes down, wages can't be paid, handicraft skills are only half-learned, and nobody wants them anywhere they go. It's the skilled artisans who actually know how to cut hair without playing tricks—they are buried right along with that bunch of card-sellers.

There is a barber in Huaihua, Hunan, named Xiaohua, who has become a viral sensation. The reason for his popularity is very simple: he doesn't push sales, he doesn't pressure you to buy a membership card, and he cuts your hair exactly how you ask him to—he actually listens to what you want. A survey shows that 98.9% of people wish there were a shop like this in their neighborhood. What does this 98.9% figure tell us? It tells us that people don't dislike getting haircuts; they just don't want to be treated like an ATM anymore. The 210,000 shops that have closed down weren't eliminated by the times; they were eliminated by their own sales tactics.

Barbering was originally the most stable business in the world. Hair grows every day, and people need a haircut every month. If your skills are decent and your prices are honest, customers can stay with you for ten years. But some people felt this money was being earned too slowly, so they started adding titles, cards, packages, and scripts, until customers were afraid to walk through the door and learned to cut their own hair instead. The sign on the door now says "Under Renovation," but there's no need to look forward to it. That shop isn't being renovated; it's just that no one is coming anymore.