Mooncakes taste the best when stir-fried.

Cover Image | Derived still of "The Ox Comes" · Mid-Autumn Festival Special · 100% Handmade Version

Mooncake sales are extremely tough this year, even more difficult than last year.

From August 14 to September 13, which was supposed to be the peak period for mooncake gifting before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the mooncake sales revenue of major national retail stores dropped by 45.17% year on year, sales volume decreased by 40.67%, and gift box sales fell by 49.04% year on year, marking the second consecutive year of decline. Last year, mooncake sales hit 28.24 billion yuan, down 5.9% from the year before, and no one can tell what the final sales figure will be this year.

Everyone says that Mid-Autumn Festival is a festival for family reunion, and mooncake is the symbol of Mid-Autumn Festival. In fact, everyone knows clearly that mooncake has long acted as a "social currency", where face value matters far more than actual quality. Since it is a "currency", it will inevitably go through cycles of appreciation, depreciation, speculation and sell-off.

As the Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, we follow the trend to sort out the mooncake finance that has gradually become a thing of the past.

Mooncake Club: Pay 3 yuan per month

In recent years, it seems that there are more and more mooncake flavors, but in fact the only difference lies in their packaging, and almost all of them taste the same. After layers of cost compression, the fillings formula of different suppliers is almost identical.

But it was not the case before. As the representative of traditional Chinese pastries, mooncake is essentially a combination of oil, salt and sugar that delights people's taste buds. These ingredients were rare in the early days, plus the exclusive secret fillings of pastry shops, mooncake became a "luxury" in those years, and ordinary people had to save money, look forward to and eat them sparingly.

Hong Kong was the first region to hype mooncakes as financial products long ago.

In the 1930s, the mooncake club appeared in Hong Kong. At that time, working people paid 1 or 2 yuan per month to the mooncake shop in the form of monthly payment, and picked up all the mooncakes at one time before Mid-Autumn Festival as gifts for relatives, friends and supervisors. In the 1950s, the monthly payment rose from 1 or 2 yuan to 3 yuan, which was about one tenth of the monthly salary of ordinary workers at that time.

After paying for 12 months for one "share" of the mooncake club, people could generally get 10 boxes of mooncakes, and most shops provided a variety of flavors, including double yolk, single yolk, five kernel, red bean paste, and bean paste. Buying mooncakes in this installment way usually gets a 30% or even 50% discount off the original price, which is quite cost-effective. If you are short of money, you can also choose to pay for "half a share" and only get 5 boxes of mooncakes.

You who are used to seeing gyms and barbershops running away with customers' money can easily imagine that when this "pay first, get goods later" model becomes widespread, some people will definitely suffer losses.

In 1958, the Ho Choi Teahouse in Kowloon City, Hong Kong ran away with the money. It received money from thousands of mooncake club shares, but when customers came to pick up mooncakes on the eve of Mid-Autumn Festival, there was only a notice posted on the door saying "We are too busy making mooncakes, distribution is suspended". Customers gathered at the door to protest for a long time, but the teahouse refused to take any responsibility and finally closed down. The mooncakes people paid for a whole year disappeared out of thin air, and the victims lost all their investment.

It is worth mentioning that in the 1950s when the mooncake club was at its peak, Hong Kong pioneered the property selling model of collecting deposit before construction and then paying by installments, commonly known as "pre-selling uncompleted properties". More than 40 years later, this model was learned and improved by the Chinese mainland as the pre-sale system, which became one of the core systems of the real estate market.

With the rapid development of Hong Kong's economy, ordinary people had more disposable money, and they no longer needed to save money to buy mooncakes, so the mooncake club gradually declined. Today, only a few shops in Yuen Long still retain the tradition of the mooncake club.

Mooncake Voucher: The gift represents your thought, no need to deliver the physical mooncake

The mooncake club is only a small step in the securitization of mooncakes, while the mooncake voucher is the essence that condenses the characteristics of contemporary economy.

Every July and August, well-known mooncake producers start to advertise, reminding people that "the deadline is coming, it's time to prepare gifts". Then, batches of beautifully printed mooncake vouchers flow from manufacturers to distributors.

Assume that the face value of a mooncake voucher is 500 yuan, and the distributor gets it at the price of 300 yuan. Then the distributor sells the voucher to Customer A at a 20% to 10% discount of the face value, here we calculate it at 80% of the face value, 400 yuan, so the distributor earns 100 yuan for each voucher.

Customer A buys the vouchers in bulk not for redeeming mooncakes for himself, but for gifting: some to employees, some to clients and relatives, such as Friend C.

Friend C has a wide social network and gets more and more mooncake vouchers, so he goes to scalpers to cash them out. Since the mooncake brand is quite well-known, scalpers recycle the vouchers at 30% to 50% of the face value, here we calculate it at 30% of the face value, 150 yuan. The price will go lower as the festival approaches. Scalpers can either resell the vouchers to individual customers at a higher price, or sell them back to the mooncake brand at 50% of the face value, here we calculate it at 250 yuan.

In this way, a large number of mooncakes do not need to be produced, but they have already completed their mission: distributors and scalpers make profits, Customer A meets the gifting needs, and Friend C also converts the gift he received into real money.

The mooncake producer earns 300 yuan for selling one voucher, and spends 250 yuan to recycle it, making a net profit of 50 yuan, without a single physical mooncake being produced.

Around the same time as mooncake vouchers, hairy crab vouchers also came into the market. In the past, people used to joke that there were too many Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs on the market, and the Yangcheng Lake could not hold them all. In fact, many Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs have never been hatched, but have already finished their short "life" through the circulation of hairy crab vouchers.

Of course, no matter it is paper mooncake, paper hairy crab or paper gold, once related to "securitization", there are risks for end consumers.

Valid redemption period, out of stock of designated products requiring extra payment for replacement, mandatory designated pickup points... Layer by layer, these are all obstacles that manufacturers may set, and in the end, the paper mooncake may really become just a piece of useless paper.

2026, A Special Mid-Autumn Festival

Back to the present. According to media reports, mooncake voucher sales are also sluggish this year. After the implementation of the new national standard for mooncakes, the number of packaging layers is limited, the unit price of mooncake gift boxes drops, and the profit margin of the whole mooncake voucher cashing industrial chain has shrunk significantly.

Interestingly, survey data shows that this year, the proportion of people buying mooncakes "for personal consumption" and "sharing with family" exceeds the proportion of "gifting" for the first time. The social attribute of mooncakes is weakening, while the festive atmosphere of family gathering is getting stronger.

This year's Mid-Autumn Festival is very special. It is only two days away from the Autumn Equinox solar term, and the fullest moon will appear at 00:49 on September 27, which is a rare case that "the moon is fullest on the 17th day of the 8th lunar month instead of the 15th".

So how are you going to spend this special Mid-Autumn Festival?

This article is from the WeChat official account "Feng Lun Feng Man Niu (Feng Lun)" (ID: fengluntalk), written by Feng Xiaoer, and authorized for release by 36Kr.