The Last Chance, Run!! How Severe Is the Job Market, Beyond Your Imagination! The Restaurant Industry Is in Total Chaos, 5 Million Down the Drain!? Qiqi Baba TALK 'Refresh & Sharpen 795' 20261011

This episode explores the current grim employment and economic landscape. Through real-life cases—including a restaurant owner in Huaqiao announcing the closure of his shop, Chengdu migrant workers facing salary cuts and layoffs, a former teacher from inside the system quitting to open a shop only to suffer losses, hotpot restaurants rolling out ultra-cheap dishes, and widespread ownership transfers in the hairdressing industry—it reflects the tough reality of regular people struggling to do business, the enormous risks of brick-and-mortar investment, and society as a whole entering a grueling state of mere survival.

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Hello, everyone, welcome to Qiqi Baba, I am Qiqi. Catching the very tail end of the time on my side, I want to congratulate Taiwan on its Double Tenth Day, 115 years old. I really feel time flies so fast. Here, I also sincerely hope the Republic of China gets better and better. I also hope the Republic of China can blow the wind of freedom and democracy toward broader lands. Well, everyone should know what I mean.

[Video clip · Restaurant owner] I spent 5 million opening the Yangjiawei Restaurant in Huaqiao, and today we officially announce its closure. Many people speculate whether we will run off; in fact, we truly have no other choice. Let me show everyone our storefront sign; it cost 170,000 to 180,000 back then. See this ceiling? When buying this ceiling back then, we ran to so many places, and finally picked it out in Shanghai. We were the first Jiangnan-style decorated place in Huaqiao. This painting cost us over 10,000 yuan back then before we put it up. In the blink of an eye, it has accompanied us for 7 years. Our place has 13 private dining rooms, big and small, and has hosted countless guests over 7 years. To tell the truth, that initial group of people has all drifted apart.

[Video clip · Restaurant owner] This fish tank cost 200,000; does everyone find that unbelievable? The main point is below: it is divided into a freshwater area, a saltwater area, and a seafood area, and the salinity and temperature maintained inside are different. And our signature Soul-Hooking Fish is the fish in here. This fish is a new employee of ours, raised from the Lunar New Year until now. The boss was quite fond of it, neither eating nor selling it; even when many guests took a liking to this fish, he wouldn't sell it. In Huaqiao, our name might be considered among the lowest. At our peak, our store had around 50 employees, paying out at least around 300,000 in wages. Liangjiawei has been open here for 7 years; although business was decent, it has indeed aged.

[Video clip · Restaurant owner] Right now it looks run-down, but our hygiene has always been clean. Before serving meals, our store manager and shift supervisor would inspect the hygiene of every area. This large table was every customer's favorite; it is a triple connected room, connected between here and here. Look, this table is the most dilapidated, but its usage rate has been the highest. This dining table has accompanied Yangjiawei for 7 years, from the first day of opening until now; every single one has marks and wear. This is what precipitated over several years, just like an old buddy. Everything here is mine, 7 years.

[Video clip] Seeing them every single day, just like my own children, spending even more time with them than with my own children. Spending more time in the store than at home, so I have been in contact with them every day.

[Video Clip - Restaurant Owner] Ultimately, we still have to embrace a new era, development is always happening, and I have to move forward too. I have to let our customers enjoy a more comfortable and cozy dining environment. Yang Jiawei's business has been running smoothly; it was popular right from the start, and business has been pretty good all the way until now. I always thought that I would just guard this shop for the rest of my life and run it well. There is nothing to be done under the current macro environment; my husband and I are already middle-aged, and our child has started the first year of high school. We just want to guard this shop well, and whether we make more or less money doesn't matter. But we still have more than 20 employees under us, which is equivalent to more than 20 families. Their ages are about the same as ours, or perhaps even younger than us. To be honest, many of our employees have followed us all the way from Jiangnan Company to the present.

[Video Clip - Restaurant Owner] Actually, shooting this video today is also to let everyone see that I am slowly changing. There are only two roads in front of me now: either drag it out and be dragged down to death by the times, or spend 4.5 million to redecorate. I want to ask everyone to give some advice; if it were you, how would you choose?

[Video Clip] Once upon a time.

Slowly.

[Video Clip] Hair turning white.

Investing money out of your own pocket now can be said to be very terrifying. Don't talk about taking out 5 million, even if it's 50,000! If you dare to invest in a purely physical storefront right now, you really have a lot of guts. Especially since I feel the catering industry is the most exaggerated right now! It's either the prices are extremely, extremely high, all for the sake of a gimmick, serving just the top one percent of people nationwide. This kind of thing, I feel we don't need to join the discussion. I mean, uh, these industries or these merchants, they have always existed, and they also have all kinds of connections. Because at any time, this group of people exists, as well as those who serve them.

Merchants, shopkeepers, uh, and not just in China, we also know that regardless of even World War I, World War II, at any time there are always these people. This is a social ratio, and everyone's impression of these people is rather exaggerated, always feeling like, wow, they appear in the newspapers today, they appear in the media, wow, how wealthy these people are, how influential their social impact is, and so on. In reality, their economic impact on the entire country and society is much, much less than we think.

Ordinary people are always the top priority, meaning ordinary people like us actually have a huge impact on the economy of this society. But right now, we can see that doing business in China makes the business of ordinary people the hardest, the absolute hardest. This implies that the economic condition is extremely terrible, because since the business of ordinary people is hard to do, it means the economic condition of the entire society is very pessimistic. Right now, prices are crazily rolling downwards.

Let's take the catering industry as an example, meaning some costs are fixed, right? You have no way to reduce them. But if you want to make a profit, you have to drive down your own prices, because the current situation of this society is just like this. Then you say, what should be done? Come on, let's take a look at this, um, how one of the links can handle it.

[Video Clip] October weather gradually cools, remember to add clothes morning and night. Days are short, nights grow longer, for the sake of living, every day is just like this, only.

Can fiddle with the ingredients, no choice, because in other places your costs, such as water, electricity, or gas, they are actually fixed costs, and they cannot be squeezed any further. There is also rent, decoration, and even employee wages, which have now been squeezed to the limit. Then to lower prices further, one can only scrape and save bit by bit from small places like ingredients, hygiene issues, or the cleaning of equipment. Therefore, really, uh, regarding the current economic condition in China, I don't think people should look at those.

Top ten people, those at the very top, how they consume; how those wealthy people in China live; don't look at that. Just focus on whether ordinary people in China still have money to consume now, meaning whether ordinary people can still very easily go, uh, consume on some entertainment or non-essential parts, entertainment consumption to make themselves happy. If you have to bitterly haggle over this point, what does it prove? It proves that there is basically no money left in this society. Who would have thought, now even Chengdu is getting hard to hold on.

[Video Clip - Chengdu Blue-collar Worker] Done. Right now, many large companies in Chengdu are cutting salaries and laying people off, and many people have been looking for jobs for two or three months. As for small companies, they are also operating at a loss and closing down one after another, and the income of individual businesses is also half less than in previous years. Very few people can truly make money. People like us, who punch the clock for work day after day, sometimes can't even bear to eat dinner, yet still euphemistically call it dieting.

[Video Clip - Chengdu Blue-collar Worker] Not to mention going out to eat casually at restaurants, because many people's car loans and mortgages haven't been paid off yet, and they keep robbing Peter to pay Paul. Credit cards are maxed out one after another, savings are used up, and cash is used; it's truly agonizing. Some people say Chengdu's average monthly income is over 10,000, but in reality, many people are just averaged into it. From what I understand, people with a monthly income of 4,000 to 5,000 are a dime a dozen. This is the true current state of many blue-collar workers in Chengdu.

More than ten years of savings are all gone. This year I've really taken a huge tumble, so I sincerely advise all ordinary people: never ever invest casually, not even a tiny amount. I originally had a job inside the system as a teacher. Sigh, my brain must have been kicked by a donkey. I actually wanted to start a business. So then, I quit my job and opened two shops in a scenic tourist area. When opening the shops, I had such lovely fantasies—I'm a boss now, and I thought I could make a name for myself. But the reality now is truly brutal. I don't know what happened to tourism this year, it's just...

The broader environment is extremely bad; literally nobody is having fun, nobody is coming out to travel anymore. I think it might be because, uh, people really just don't have much money left in their pockets. So as you can imagine, my shops have had no business whatsoever. From March after the Chinese New Year until now, it's almost October, right? Uh, my revenue, my revenue volume, um, is, uh, still less than 5,000 yuan. Isn't that ridiculous? Sigh, that's why, you know...

Never invest casually. My biggest realization now is, um, do not invest, do not invest. Even if the amount isn't big, do not invest. Because holding real cash in hand and living a peaceful, steady life is actually already great. Having nothing happen is the best thing. Ordinary people cannot shoulder the risks brought by investment failures; once the money is gone, life becomes extremely passive and constrained, just like me right now. It's not that people shouldn't strive, but when you go to invest, you must clearly see the current situation, weigh the pros and cons, see if you can bear it yourself, and examine the market. Never invest blindly, yeah.

The entire population has entered an era of pure basic living. Everyone says the economy is declining, but have you truly felt it in your everyday life? I felt it especially strongly today. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, relatives gathered and suggested going for hot pot. They kept saying "three-six-nine, three-six-nine." I asked, is "Three-Six-Nine" the name of the restaurant? I hadn't heard of it before. Only after arriving did I realize it wasn't; it was the price per plate. There were vegetarian dishes and meat dishes for 3 yuan, 6 yuan, and 9 yuan. Then with ten people, and they also drank a few bottles of beer, the bill came to just over 200 yuan—meaning around 20-something yuan per person. I was shocked right then. I thought, 20-something yuan, I remember that was back when I was in high school, over ten years ago. So I asked, why is it so cheap? They started chatting and said that after this hot pot place rolled out the "three-six-nine" pricing, several neighboring hot pot places that used to be relatively expensive found they couldn't keep going, so many surrounding hot pot restaurants also switched to "three-six-nine."

Has the economic downturn reached such an extent? And we ate until we were completely full, and I thought the taste was quite decent. Now it's evening, and I didn't eat dinner because I was too full. I even went to workout this afternoon, and after working out until now I still don't feel hungry at all. I feel I need to adjust my survival strategy. Do you have a particularly deep feeling about this right now? That with the economic downturn, prices have returned to ten or twenty years ago.

Does everyone know how terrible the situation is right now, how hard it is to make money? Today I saw—because we work in hairdressing, hairdressers always have two or three group chats, especially as a boss you definitely monitor these groups all the time. Just because I opened this hairdressing group chat, I saw so many messages like this, an especially large amount recently, truly an enormous amount. Sigh, let me flip the camera around to show you. Look at my hairdressing group chat: see, tons of lease transfers, tons of transfers. And like I said, these days transfer fees are very hard to get. Come look, inside the hairdressing transfer group chat, sigh, this is one of the groups, and this hairdressing group too.

Look.

So many hairdressing group chats, transferring leases, how terrifying! Also let me look up Xianyu. Look, hair salons transferring leases. Then I hold and select the nearest ones nearby, uh, I select one nearest nearby. Look, barber shop lease transfer, transfer, uh, lease transfers nearby, transfers.

How many, how many? Look how exaggerated these numbers are! So sometimes, sometimes when I chat with bosses from other industries, they say business is very hard to do this year. Sometimes, whether it's customers or friends in the industry, they say: "Oh, you're in hairdressing, isn't hairdressing an essential need? Hairdressing business should be fine, it won't be affected by the internet or whatever, right? You need a haircut, people always need haircuts, it's always an essential need."

Sigh, so sometimes when I hear words like these, I just smile bitterly. If it were truly like you imagine, there wouldn't be so many people putting up transfer notices. And then of course there's this issue. Let me tell you, so many transfer notices are up. If someone working in hairdressing has recently been thinking about posting a notice to transfer, we all know hair salons can hardly, uh, very rarely put up a transfer notice right on their own front door. Because first, you'll scare customers away and they won't come back. Second, most hair salons have prepaid membership card funds, because you definitely have a membership card scheme. If you issue membership cards, then you definitely have liabilities. When you have liabilities, if you don't...

You don't have that whatever, uh, under conditions where you have liabilities, you just post a transfer notice right on the front door. Let me tell you, the very next day a ton of regular customers will come directly demanding refunds on their cards. Everyone understands this. And also, let me tell you, if you want to transfer your lease, never be too greedy. Let me tell you, never be too greedy. For those wanting to transfer, be realistic: if you can just get the landlord's deposit back, you're already doing very well.

These days are not like before; if you want to transfer your business, you have to do the math. Oh my, how much did I spend on the entry fee back then? How much did I spend on renovations? I thought I could at least get fifty or seventy percent back. Let me tell you, don't even think about it. So I'm telling you, if you want to transfer your business, you'd be lucky if you could just get your deposit back. Because whoever comes in next also has to pay a two-month deposit, so if you negotiate with them, it's already not bad if you can just get that two-month deposit back.

What can Chinese people do? Even from our perspective looking at them from the outside, it feels quite desperate. It's just that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists on keeping the lid on this pot, and the frogs inside have no strength to resist; they seem to be in a very weakened state from being tortured, so there really is no way out. Alright, that is all for this episode. If you would like to support me, please join the membership channel. I really look forward to chatting with everyone in real-time during the member-only live streams. That's it for this episode, see you next time.