There are more and more "millet shops" in shopping malls.
Millet can be simply understood as the anime peripherals of the past. Starting in the second half of 2023, "ACG saves the old shopping mall" has become a hot topic on social media, and shopping malls such as Beijing Xifanli, Shanghai Bailian ZX Creative Field, and Wuhan Trend Box X118 have been transformed into themed shopping malls and cultural spaces dominated by millet shops.
Different from the trendy toys and figurines of the past, this wave of popular millet is mainly consumed by junior and senior high school students. Why is millet so popular? How much spending power do middle and high school students have, and where does it come from?
More and more millet shops
"Trash", "What's this", "Hate you"...... Sansan sat on the pony, unpacking the card bag in his hand while muttering, and the empty bag in his hand soon piled up as high as a hill. "Ahh Two screams suddenly broke out, frightening the whole store to look sideways, the proprietress Zhu Mei hurriedly stepped forward to appease, Sansan's excitement had not subsided, raised the card in his hand, and showed Zhu Mei: "I drew it"!
Sansan is 13 years old this year, and she is drawing a food play card from the anime "Tokyo Revengers", 15 yuan a pack, which contains more than 20 different character cards, randomly bagged, and sold in the form of "blind boxes". Sansan likes Mikey, the character in "Tokyo Revengers", and two minutes ago, she bought ten packs of cards and was lucky to "bet on it".
33 dismantled cards (photo provided by the author)
Gacha is just one type of "millet". Millet is a homonym for the English "Goods" (goods), which covers a wide range of categories, the most popular are bar chirps (tinplate badges), cards, polaroids, pendants and other portable items, as well as stands, ornaments, figures and other categories. In short, all peripheral products derived from copyrighted works such as comics and animations can be called "valley", which is sought after by many two-dimensional players and forms a "valley circle".
Zhang Long and Zhu Mei's shop was full of these grains. In 2018, they opened this "Trendy Toys 4S" store in Beijing's Daliushu Market, which mainly sells trendy toys and figures, that is, three-dimensional models with a high threshold and more expensive unit price, and the audience is mainly adult groups such as the post-80s and post-90s.
Starting in the second half of 2022, Zhang Long's original goods are somewhat "unsellable", and the monthly net profit is only a few thousand yuan. In March this year, Zhang Long tried to transform to sell lighter millet, and the audience was mainly for middle and high school students, and unexpectedly, the store was "revitalized". Now, the monthly net profit is nearly 20,000 yuan.
Zhang Long caught up with the wind of opening a millet shop. In the second half of 2023, "ACG Save the Old Shopping Mall" will become a hot topic on social media, with Beijing Xifanli, Shanghai Bailian ZX Creative Field, Wuhan Trend Box X118, etc., all of which have been transformed into themed shopping malls dominated by millet stores.
Zhang Long and Zhu Mei's shop (photo provided by the author)
Su Meng is from Wuhan, 26 years old this year, since elementary school began to chase Japanese manga, in 2016 when I went to college for the first time to buy millet, at that time it was more than 900 yuan, through private purchasing, bought three stands, from the order to the receipt, experienced three or four months. "Guquan" used to be a small group, and this kind of online purchasing and group sharing was also the mainstream way to buy millet.
In the middle of 2023, shopping in a small alley near Jianghan Road, Su Meng found an offline millet shop for the first time, the store is very small, more than 10 square meters, four or five people can't turn around, and the price is also expensive, the purchase price of 80-100 yuan of millet will be sold for 140-160 yuan in the store. At that time, she only walked around and came out.
But she didn't expect that there would soon be more and more offline valley stores, and the store address would also be squeezed into the shopping mall in the city center from the "corner", and in Wuhan, the most well-known is "Trend Box X118", formerly known as New World Department Store. According to media reports, the person in charge of the operation of the mall revealed that the mall spent nearly one million to clear all the women's clothing floor stores and introduce more than 30 animation-related formats from all over the country; 15% of the prime area will be abandoned for rent, and will be converted into a public stage and open powder rooms; 3 anime cruises per week.
A still from "Half, Blue".
Su Meng has also become the "true fragrance" party of the offline millet shop. She remembers that from January to April this year, new stores opened every week, and she spent every weekend visiting them with friends. After shopping a lot, some millet that "won't be bought even if you die" online is bought casually offline. The related consumption on the ledger has also risen - in 2021, Su Meng's two-dimensional expenditure will be more than 700 yuan, and in 2023, it will become more than 8,000 yuan, and just over half this year, she has spent more than 6,000 yuan to buy millet.
The staggering spending power of middle and high school students
Adult "millet" consumers like Su Meng are only a minority.
40-year-old Liu Lei is also the owner of the millet shop who entered the game this year. His store "Box Tang Xiaozhan" is located on the B2 floor of Wangfujing Joy Shopping Center, a well-known two-dimensional gathering place in Beijing. Liu Lei used to be the regional manager of Bubble Mart, and when Joy was preparing to open in 2023, he heard from the person in charge that the B2 floor was ready to create a trendy place for young people to gather, so he and three former colleagues partnered to open this store, mainly engaged in trendy toys and figures, becoming the earliest batch of stores in Joy, and the customer group was positioned between 24-35 years old. He remembers that at that time, there were only two millet shops on the entire B2 floor that cated to a younger group.
Half a month after opening the store, he noticed that something was wrong. The other shops were sparsely populated, and the two millet shops were overcrowded. He sent his partner to "investigate", and within two days, the other party brought back a box of bars and said, "They will sell this." This is the first time Liu Lei has heard of the word "millet", and when he saw the mainstream customers coming and going in school uniforms in the mall, he immediately decided to transform.
Stills from "Problem Restaurant".
It was a successful decision. In Liu Lei's store, the figurines are almost unpopular except for Hatsune Miku, but after starting to sell lightweight millet, "there is nothing that can't be sold", the best-selling blind pumping bar, he sells thirty or forty boxes a week, sometimes just put on the shelves, twist the head, and one box is empty. His turnover was only tens of thousands of yuan a month at first, and only half a year later, and now "I have to add another zero later". In addition to the 6 permanent store assistants, he needs to recruit part-time helpers every weekend.
Regarding the consumer group, Liu Lei said, "Of course, minors are the main force, 100% of the main force." On the whole, bar chirps and cards are the best-selling products, on the one hand, these things occupy a small area and are easy to store and preserve; On the other hand, bars and pieces of paper can be used to tie "pain bags" (bags full of anime character badges and dolls) and carry them on your back. When children see people carrying "self-push" (their favorite characters) with a painful bag, they can come forward to talk and make friends.
Of course, the main reason is also the popularity of ACG among students. There are children in the store who will tell Zhang Long that there are 35 people in his class, and 30 people all watch the same anime, but he hasn't watched it, so he doesn't have a common topic with everyone, and he will quickly make up for this. A sixth-grade elementary school student said that the Japanese manga "Volleyball Boy!! It was very popular in their school, resulting in more than 20 volleyball teams in one school. Visiting the grain shop after school and on weekends has also become a new social activity for these children.
In the valley circle, millet is divided into day valley and national valley, that is, daily millet and domestic millet. For example, the price of Guogu is generally 15-20 yuan, while the price of Rigu is generally between 40-80 yuan. The bar is just a tin badge, and in the eyes of many adults, such a price is incomprehensible.
Around the millet shop (photo provided by the author)
Liu Lei was also very surprised when he first sold millet, and during the Chinese New Year, his store ushered in a wave of climax, where the children bought things and put them in baskets like they didn't need money, and went to the cashier to directly take out red envelopes and draw out 100 yuan bills to settle the bill. "That feeling is, it makes no difference to them whether this thing costs 250 yuan or 350 yuan, and if you want it, you just buy it."
Another shopkeeper, Zhang Long, also noticed that many middle and high school children do not have a deep concept of money, and buy it if they like it, and care more about emotional value than practical value, "If you ask me to spend 50 yuan to buy an iron piece, I will definitely not buy it, I will think about how many catties of meat can be bought, but children are different." In terms of consumption habits, junior and senior high schools are also more inclined to buy bars and cards, while college students are more inclined to buy practical products such as folders and notebooks. Zhang Long also mentioned that junior and senior high school students usually do not have Alipay, and can only transfer money on WeChat, which is very inconvenient to shop on Taobao, Xianyu and other platforms, so they will also tend to shop offline.
On June 15, 2024, Hangzhou, the second and third floors of Hubin 88 shopping mall attract young people. (Photo courtesy of Visual China)
Why do they buy millet
Of course, not all children don't care about the price. Zhang Long said that he often sees children shopping while searching for price comparisons on their mobile phones. Some limited and out-of-print millet prices are high in the secondary market, and children will also buy them offline and resell them.
Last month, the average unit price in Liu Lei's store was 58 yuan, and Zhu Mei's store was between 80 and 90 yuan. Of course, when it comes to each child, the average order value varies greatly. Most children only buy one or two small things at a time, spending twenty or thirty yuan, and their parents bring them to spend more, two or three hundred yuan. There are also many children who buy five or six hundred yuan of millet in one go, and every time they meet it, Zhu Mei will always routinely ask: Do your parents know?
"The reprint is out! Stills
Zhang Long and Zhu Mei's shop also sells millet online, and in the three months since the transformation, she occasionally encountered parents who said they didn't know about it and came to refund the order. But offline, she hasn't encountered it yet. Sometimes, she chats with parents who come to the store, and some parents tell her that their children are too stressed, and it is worth it to spend a few hundred yuan to buy their children's happiness.
Zhang Long and Zhu Mei also have a son who is in the fourth grade of elementary school, and the son has not yet entered the stage of watching anime, but it is very popular among classmates to draw an Ultraman card. Once, Zhang Long took his son to buy a card and spent more than 900 yuan in one go. Although Zhang Long himself opened the store, he was still taken aback, but "the child said that there are classmates around him, and he wants it, so what should you do?" Later, every Friday, Zhang Long went to school to pick up his son from school, and every time he found that the Ultraman card in the commissary near the school was bought out, and the waste card that he lost after drawing was lying all over the ground.
Sansan, a 13-year-old girl mentioned at the beginning of the article, spent a few hundred yuan in Zhu Mei's store that day. When Zhu Mei asked her if her parents knew, she said with some pride that she was a "flying party" (her parents were very supportive, but on the contrary it was an "underground party"), and she would spend about 2,000 yuan a month to buy grain. She also said that when she proposed to go to Japan to buy millet in July, her parents' answer was, "Go"! She wanted to change her bedroom into a "pain room" (the whole room was covered around the anime), and her parents also said "change"! Zhu Mei asked casually, how big is your bedroom? 33 rhetorical question: How big is your store? Zhu Mei said, forty square meters, three or three thought about it, my bedroom is slightly larger than the store, forty-five square meters.
As a child from a wealthy family, Sansan said that her parents did not support her from the beginning. For example, when she once "expanded" (expanded the list of friends) to 3,000 WeChat friends, her parents thought that she would follow the bad and forced her to delete them one by one. But Sansan said that he had actually experienced school bullying, was made a yellow rumor, and later began to smoke and drink, swallow drugs and self-harm, experienced hospitalization, and is now suspending school. After that, her parents' attitude became, "As long as I can be happy, anything." And Sansan, who was sitting in front of me, had clear scratches on his arms, and he was very thin, and his thighs were not as thick as the arms of adult women.
Stills from "Little Joy".
Sansan's case is not unique. Zhu Mei recalled that in the three months since she sold millet, she had seen no less than ten such children covered with traces of self-harm. Another shopkeeper, Liu Lei, also told me that he had also seen such scratches on many children, but never asked, which was the common trait he found among some of the children who came to the store: introverted, relatively closed-minded, and prone to depression.
Therefore, there are some tacit rules in the store: children must not say welcome when they enter the store, and do not take the initiative to talk to them, let them choose quietly by themselves, so that they will feel comfortable. As I walked around the B2 floor of Joy, I lingered in front of a few stall girls, and without exception, none of them looked up or tried to say anything. This reminds me of Liu Lei's unbelievable expression when he asked, "Do the parents of these children support them to buy grain?"
"How can you ask this kind of privacy question?" He has a lot of regular customers, but the communication stops on the topic of "what are you pushing" (who is your favorite character), what cards have been drawn recently, and what valleys do you want. Family, school, friends, and grades are all isolated from the bars, papers, and stands on this floor.
The boundary between the offline millet store and the real world may be the reason why these children are willing to come here and stay. Luoluo used to go to the B2 floor of Joy to buy grain, she is 16 years old this year and is in her second year of high school. At the age of 12, he entered the pit, and since he found out that there was an offline store last summer, he has now bought two or three thousand yuan of millet. She said that in the valley circle she is in, she spends less. On the one hand, the online process is complicated, reporting the number, "handing over the kidney" (collecting money), staring at logistics, and replenishing mail, all the time to keep an eye on; On the other hand, she enjoys the feeling of picking and selling in offline stores one by one, and only buys a few dozen yuan each time, not caring about the premium.
The millet shop in Wangfujing Joy Shopping Center in Beijing
Luoluo said that when he first started buying grain, he often went to a small shop in Beixinqiao. During last year's winter vacation, after millet began to appear on a large scale in Wangfujing Joy Mall, her position was moved here, and she would go there 3 or 4 times a week. For her, it's like a social place, where she can not only shop but also set up a stall to sell her own grain.
Every time, Luoluo changes into a different cossuit, and when he sees a friend or other coser, he will come forward to talk to him and "expand" his friends. Now, she has more than 1,000 WeChat friends. Liu Lei also noticed that during the winter vacation, many children came every day, "going home is to sleep, and come over as soon as the mall opens", which is more active than clocking in to work, and staying is a whole day.
Will it keep on fire?
As the two-dimensional atmosphere of the mall became stronger and stronger, Zhang Long has been pondering whether to move the store to the mall.
Zhang Long said that in August 2022, he participated in a "trend market" held in a shopping mall in Chongwenmen. At that time, most of the stalls selling peripheral figurines had a turnover of more than 30,000 in 6 days. He remembers that after that, the mall began to try to attract investment, and the price was very favorable, with a monthly rent of more than 10,000 yuan for an 80-square-meter store, but there were not many stores stationed there, and considering the reasons including the epidemic, he did not settle in at that time.
Before the opening of Wangfujing Joy, Zhang Long had approached the store, and the monthly rent of the store was 32,000 yuan, which was nearly four times the rent of Daliushu's store, and now the price must be higher. Indeed, Liu Lei said that when the B2 floor of Wangfujing Joy Shopping Center first opened, the average daily rent was about 8 yuan per square meter, and now it has risen to about 15-20 yuan. Zhang Long is also worried that the mall has a fixed business hours of 10 in the morning and 10 in the evening, and the mom-and-pop store model will definitely not work, and the cost will increase significantly if it hires people.
Wangfujing Joy B2 floor, the soon-to-open Xingu store
However, what worries him the most is: how long can the trend of millet be popular? Liu Lei said that on the B2 floor of Wangfujing Joy Shopping Mall, the main business of the cat shop and flower shop next door to him has also become selling millet. This is known in the circle as the "current party", that is, the two-dimensional outsiders who rush up when they see a business opportunity.
On social platforms, more and more people mention the homogenization phenomenon of millet shops, such as almost all stores selling popular IPs such as Volleyball Boy, Demon Slayer Blade, and Spell Return. Some stores have begun to enter the subdivision track, such as only selling money from the day valley field and only selling a certain IP. Liu Lei is also seeking change, this month, he opened the membership system, hoping to increase customer stickiness through ladder discounts.
The price war has also begun. Zhang Long had obvious feelings when he went to Joy last time, the same bar, walked down in a circle, some shops sold for more than 40 yuan, some sold for 38 yuan, and the cheapest sold for 32 yuan.
As a consumer, Sansan doesn't feel much about these yet. After drawing Mikey, she bought more than a dozen packs of cards and continued to disassemble them. At this time, she had already spent more than 400 yuan in the store, and while she was frustrated that she was unlucky this time and didn't draw Mikey again, she swore to Zhu Mei that "I didn't bring my wallet today, and I'll send you money next time."
"Don't draw a card, let's draw a coaster", Zhu Mei got up and took a coaster's blind bag and opened it, and shot into the soul (indicating that an attack that caused the opponent to be severely disabled or even killed in seconds in the game or the joy of getting a high-rarity item at once), it was Mikey. She first secretly showed it to me and Sansan's friends, signaling us to keep it secret, and then pretended to be regretful and handed the coaster to Sansan, "Help you draw one, I didn't win, it's the person you hate the most." ”
Stills from "Twenty Don't Confuse".
Sansan didn't care, took it, and prepared to put it directly on the table, Zhu Mei had to remind her, you take a look. "Ahh In the end, Zhu Mei gave this coaster to Sansan for free.