"The Run-down Shop" Transformed into "Budget Self-service" to Save Workers Who Can't Afford Good Meals

Buffet, A New Traffic Password

For the evening feast, Xiaoji hasn't eaten for a whole day.

A few weeks ago, because she saw her favorite food blogger evaluating a self-service burger shop on short videos, she, who has always loved hamburgers, became interested. "Can hamburgers be self-service now?" She opened the social software, searched, and found that there were several self-service burger shops in Beijing where she lived, and the prices were mostly around 100 yuan.

She was attracted by a self-service burger shop that claimed to be "the first in Beijing". It is said that in the store, you can order à la carte or have a buffet. The à la carte prices are mostly 69 and 79 yuan, and the buffet price is 128 yuan (108 yuan on weekdays), including 10 kinds of hamburgers, fried chicken, salads and other snacks, with a time limit of 100 minutes. The buffet is divided into two sessions in the morning and afternoon. The morning session is from 11:00 to 14:30, and the afternoon session is from 16:30 to 21:00.

Xiaoji is a hamburger lover. In the first few years when she just arrived in Beijing, in addition to those well-known fast food brands, she also often went to pubs and bistros to eat hamburgers with her friends. A hamburger costs 80 or 90 yuan at every turn. With some sweet potato fries, chicken nuggets, and drinks, a person can't have a good meal without spending at least 150 yuan per capita. In the past two years, due to the economic downturn, Xiaoji and her friends have started to reduce their consumption when going out for meals. They avoid high-consumption places like bistros, and the number of times they eat American hamburgers is also countable.

For Xiaoji, the self-service form has a lower per capita price and more varieties to eat, and its cost performance is far higher than that of bistros. She made an appointment with her friends to check in on the weekend.

On the weekend, the two of them walked around the building with the navigation for several laps before they saw the burger shop located at the corner of the first floor of a business building. The store is not big and relatively hidden. Xiaoji and her friend entered the store at 3:30 pm, before the restaurant's business hours. The lights in the store were off and it was dark. The store is not big, with only nearly ten sets of tables and chairs, making the store seem cramped. At a glance, it is no different from an ordinary burger shop. The only things related to the buffet are two beverage machines and the buffet dining rules posted on the wall.

The hamburger that Xiaoji and her friend ate together

Less than an hour later, the store was full. According to Xiaoji's observation, all the customers in the store are young people, and almost all of them come for the buffet. There are couples, friends, food bloggers who come specifically for evaluation, and there are two tables of boys who come to eat alone.

It is obvious that the buffet has once again been favored by young people.

Searching for "buffet" on Xiaohongshu, you can find more than 1.87 million notes. And having a buffet has also become a new traffic password on social media. A food blogger in the field of food on Douyin started with the buffet evaluation and gained 2 million followers in less than a year.

However, different from a few years ago, these buffets are no longer just the familiar seafood buffets and barbecue buffets, but a number of newer categories have emerged - hamburger buffets, fried chicken buffets, dessert buffets, durian buffets... Not only that, people's demands for buffets have also changed. A few years ago, the main goal was to "eat back the cost". Various buffet cost-recovery strategies have become a must-read guide for consumers before having a buffet, and they are determined to "enter walking and leave leaning on the wall". Now, in addition to pursuing cost performance like Xiaoji, trying new things is also the demand of many young people.

At the end of last year, Wenxin learned that a bakery in Beijing that she likes had started a dessert buffet after seeing a netizen's sharing of the dessert buffet experience. She clicked on the bakery community group that she had added before and found that the owner opened a new store. In order to attract customers, several buffet activities would be organized every weekend, with 60 places for each session, and reservations had to be made by snatching numbers in the community group.

Looking at the overwhelming positive reviews on social media, some said "The experience is very comfortable", others said "The boss is doing charity", and even some said "It's really delicious. It's a bread buffet that I will remember for a lifetime". Wenxin was also eager to try.

She had eaten this bakery's bread at a bread festival before and fell in love with it immediately. She thought that their bread had a lot of fillings and good ingredients. However, the price was not low. A bread cost at least 40 yuan, and she could only afford to buy one occasionally. But in the buffet activity, she can enjoy more than 20 kinds of bread in the store for only 108 yuan. How could she not go?

The self-service form makes the reservation places of this store very popular, and Wenxin has been unable to get a place. She stayed in the group for a month before she got two reservation places for the noon session on January 5th by chance. Although the merchant raised the buffet price to 158 yuan since January this year, Wenxin thinks the price is a bit too high, but she has been "brainwashed" by the netizens' good reviews and can't suppress her impulse at all.

The day Wenxin arrived at the store, half an hour before the meal started, there were already many "sweet tooths" in the store. Wenxin chose a cup of coffee at the front desk and sat down with her friend at a random place. Because she arrived on time, Wenxin caught the first wave of meal collection. However, because there were too many people dining, the queue was as long as in a cafeteria. There were more than 20 kinds of bread on the dining table, all of which were not big, similar to the samples in the bakery. In order to try more varieties, Wenxin took only one piece of each type.

The bread buffet that Wenxin ate, Picture source: Xiaohongshu @Glacier_

Small hamburgers, kebabs, King Cake, fruit Danish... Every once in a while, the store will open new categories. Consumers sitting at the table have to go to the front desk to queue for meals again and again. On social media, there are always people who make vlogs of their queuing process over and over again. It is common for netizens to be attracted by the popularity of this store. "My goodness, there is such a thing!" "It looks delicious", of course, some people also questioned the form of the buffet, "It seems that you can't eat much."

"Small Run-down Shops" Transformed into Buffets

Young people's renewed love for buffets is a new opportunity and a lifeline for some catering businesses.

Manji Dessert, which once closed many stores in multiple locations and was even suspected of taking over the baton of Xu Liushan's bankruptcy, has launched a "48 yuan eat as you like" dessert buffet since 2023 and continuously expanded the number of self-service stores, attracting a group of dessert lovers. According to the official public account news, currently, Manji's self-service has covered 90 stores nationwide, "setting off a craze of millions of bloggers exploring the stores across the network". Many other chain catering brands, such as Nanchengxiang, Pizza Hut, and Gelaoguan, have also launched self-service and all-you-can-eat activities one after another, trying to please consumers with the traffic password of the buffet.

More and more catering people have entered the "honeymoon period" with the buffet.

A few years ago, when it comes to buffets, everyone's impression was that "buffets are not doing well" and "businesses are collectively experiencing a cold spell". According to data from Qichacha, in 2021, the number of newly registered buffet enterprises was only 1,618, a year-on-year drop of 35.6%, hitting the lowest level in the past 10 years. However, in the past two years, this number has somewhat reversed. According to Qichacha data, In 2023, the number of buffet-related enterprises registered nationwide was nearly 6,000, and from January to July 2024, the registration number also reached more than 2,600.

Among them, many practitioners in the small catering industry have also applied the universal formula of self-service in the middle of opening their stores.

In June last year, after finding that more and more young people love to eat in "small run-down shops", Abby, who loves American hamburgers, and her husband also aimed at the market of small catering businesses. The two of them took out 200,000 yuan and opened an American burger shop in Hangzhou together.

They adopted the form of a husband-and-wife store. Abby's husband is responsible for making hamburgers, and Abby is responsible for publicity and operation in her spare time from her main job. The hamburgers focus on high-end quality. The beef is M5-grade Australian Angus beef, and the sauce is also made by hand, so the unit price of the hamburgers is not low, ranging from 40 yuan to 68 yuan, even comparable to the high-end burger shop Shake Shack.

The hamburger in Abby's store

When it first opened, it was summer, and people's appetite was not high. As a high-carbon and high-calorie diet, hamburgers were not the first choice for dining. And Abby's store is located near an old residential area. In the sweltering weather, few people are willing to "travel far" for a meal. During that period, although there were intermittently a few customers, most of the time, the store was still very deserted, and the monthly revenue was only enough to cover the rent cost.

Abby originally thought that the lack of customers was due to the weather, but as the temperature cooled, the passenger flow still did not increase significantly, and the store has been in a loss-making state. Abby was a little anxious and planned to find some influencers to explore the store or carry out online marketing. Until November, a top food blogger in Hangzhou evaluated a self-service burger shop and made it popular with his own traffic, attracting many young people to come and check in.

This gave Abby an inspiration. She decided to follow suit and added a self-service activity on the basis of the à la carte form. It costs 129 yuan per person, and you can eat all the hamburgers, as well as four kinds of snacks and sodas. In this way, the passenger flow is increased, and the income of the store is increased in the form of small profits but quick turnover. In order to improve competitiveness, Abby and her husband also specially developed 3 new hamburgers, increasing the types of self-service hamburgers to 10. After all, "For the same hamburger buffet, if one store has 7 (categories) and the other has 10, I will definitely choose the one with 10 because there are more options."

The effect is indeed remarkable. Since the launch of the self-service form, Abby's store has welcomed many small anchors to come and explore the store spontaneously. This has also formed a catfish effect, attracting many male college students to come and check in, and even the most frequent ones have come to check in three times. With the support of traffic and relying on the quality and taste of the ingredients, Abby's store reversed the loss of 1,000 to 2,000 yuan per month in less than two months and achieved a profit.

Da Huan in the same city of Hangzhou had the idea of doing a hamburger buffet earlier.

In July last year, he found that buffets have become popular again in the catering market. "16 yuan self-service fast food with freshly cooked dishes, 29 yuan self-service hot pot, 49 yuan self-service barbecue, and restaurants in dessert, crayfish, afternoon tea and other tracks have also introduced the self-service mode." However, without any catering experience, Da Huan did not dare to easily enter the competition and decided to adopt the à la carte form first to polish the products and accumulate the experience of operating the store.

One month later, Da Huan's store opened, featuring high-end quality with a total of 10 kinds of hamburgers, with prices ranging from 29 yuan to 58 yuan. Because the store is located next to a university, the majority of the customers are student groups. Although there are always people coming to check in, there are not many repeat customers in the store. After all, for college students, this price is much higher than the "poor ghost set meal" of various fast food restaurants. They also often reflect to Da Huan, "The things are good, the quality is good, but the consumption is also a bit high."

The hamburger in Da Huan's store 

But the raw material cost of American hamburgers is originally high, and it is not realistic to lower the price by reducing the quality of the products considering the labor cost and time cost of research and development. If you want to engage in a price war, you can only reduce the quality of the products, and the result is that the products become worse and worse, "and finally it is a dead end."

Da Huan wanted to find a new way out. During the process, "The first self-service burger in Hangzhou" was opened by someone else first. He realized that if he doesn't make a change, the store will definitely decline. Two months after the business started, Da Huan still decided to launch a hamburger buffet, with a price of 79 yuan per person and no time limit.

Higher cost performance has brought some repeat customers to the store. In December, a top food blogger also came to Da Huan's store. Since that day, the store has been in a booming state. From 10 am to 9 pm, there are continuous queues. The fifteen tables and chairs in the store are never empty, and the daily revenue can be more than 10,000 yuan.

Self-service burger shops in Hangzhou are springing up like mushrooms.