Opening a small shop is about the common "wilderness" in the hearts of many ordinary people today.
In the science fiction movie "Prometheus", the robot Feifa says to Elizabeth, the protagonist who is on the run: "Life is a wilderness, not a track. "In 2012, the year the movie was released, the hottest sci-fi film on the planet was "The Avengers". No one expected that this originally inconspicuous line would be wrapped in a thick romantic filter many years later and become a self-evident workplace belief on the Chinese Internet.
The older generation opened breakfast shops, newsstands, and barber shops, got up early and worked greedily to run their own one-third of an acre of land, and also managed the daily life of the neighborhood; Xinxin young people open shops, coffee shops, and cake shops, and are no longer willing to be confined to their workstations, and they are looking forward to finding a little freedom of flow for their careers.
As Max Weber said in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "In life, a man lives for his cause, not runs his business for his survival." "Opening a small shop is not looking for a "job", it requires gambling luck and fighting spirit, lacks stable preconditions, and does not have a bright white-collar life. But it has broad possibilities, which can make people have a scarce sense of freedom to control their lives, so it has become a white moonlight rooted in the hearts of migrant workers.
To put it bluntly, part-time work is someone else's business, and opening a store is your own business. Going to work is just to survive, and opening a store is the ideal to reach.
Shiguang Road in Panyu, Guangzhou, has a wide sidewalk comparable to two motorized lanes. This unique advantage provides a lot of room for imagination for long nights.
At one end of the street corner, the aunties will occupy their exclusive square dance territory early after dinner. 200 meters away under the big tree, the sky is not dark, and the lively night market is opened, with milk tea, fried rice, and bowl chicken. The rich and hot fireworks just filled the embarrassment of the few restaurants around and nourished the stomachs of many students who were tired of eating in the cafeteria in nearby vocational schools.
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Ah Zou is almost the youngest owner in the night market. Different from others, because he also has a stable job, his mentality is much more relaxed than his peers around him, he does not "roll" the category or "roll" service, only sells snacks and pickles from his hometown Xuwen County, and holds the mentality of selling as much as he wants, making a little money and passing the time after work. Although the work of an optometrist does not earn much, he leaves work at 4 p.m. every day, so that he has plenty of time to go out of the stall.
Qiqi is making wall paintings for vintage stores. (Photo/Provided by the interviewee)
According to Qiqi's plan, she originally only planned to open a small but beautiful coffee shop in order to completely get rid of the life of a migrant worker. But there are a thousand "coffee dreams" hidden in the hearts of a thousand contemporary young people, and the "small and beautiful" track of coffee shops is indeed a bit "big and full" today. "I just wanted to take the store down, but the façade was cut off!"
Qiqi, who failed to succeed in his school, went around and realized his "boss dream" - he chose the small façade of an old bungalow instead. This is a vintage store left by the previous owner.,Qiqi originally planned to transform into a coffee shop after clearing the goods.,As a result, he fell in love with it in a short period of time.。 Two years later, she not only opened her own coffee shop as she wished, but also maintained this second-hand clothing store that was not very popular.
For migrant workers, not wanting to go to work is perhaps the most widespread social syndrome today, and working life is like a subway track on the commute from the rental house to the office, not forever dark, but always able to see the end at a glance - oh no, unless you get the establishment and become a "young man on the shore" of a thousand. How can there be a real "head" for a part-time job?
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Especially when all kinds of pressure are coming, when will the "consumables" of the big factory squeeze the body dry? Where do you go after the age of 35, 45, or 55? Will the knowledge and experience accumulated over the years be replaced by the advent of AI? There are many problems every day, but there are not always solutions in the cubicles.
The generation that grew up in the market economy certainly understands the inevitability and cruelty of workplace competition. But when the path of the parents is completely difficult to refer to, ordinary people can't help but carefully consider whether the current track can run firmly for another 30 years.
Many years ago, after her husband's small garment factory closed, Aunt Liao, a native of Zigong, originally planned to go to Shenzhen to be a "deep drifter". But under the persuasion of her husband, she decided to stay in Guangzhou and went to Tongfuxi in Haizhu District to set up a newsstand.
June 30, 2023, Guangzhou, Guangdong. Aunt Liao plays the guitar in the shop, and the guitar has "The Outside World" and her name written on it. (Photo/Lin Zejun)
In the past 20 years, the newsstand has become a commissary, and business has long been much worse than before. But 55-year-old Aunt Liao had already bought social security for herself through a small shop in her early years, and her monthly pension was not much, but it was enough to cover food and clothing. A neighbor boy who sang by the river taught Aunt Liao to play the guitar, so she drew staves on the walls of the shop and spent most of her spare time practicing.
In fact, before opening the store, Aunt Liao, like many mothers, used to be female workers on the assembly line. If you still choose to "drift deeply" at the beginning, what else can female workers who have no education, lack of craftsmanship, and are over 35 years old? There are no ifs in life, but it is conceivable that Aunt Liao will not have too many opportunities to deviate from the track, nor will she have the leisure to learn guitar.
The words on the guitar were written with the help of a passer-by who knew calligraphy. (Photo/Lin Zejun)
From this point of view, it is obviously more stable to vacate a small store with decent revenue than to be a demographic dividend in the workplace.
If it is the train that is speeding on the track, then the small shops dotted on the "wilderness" are the strong grass swaying in the hearts of the "track people".
Admittedly, there are risks associated with opening a small shop. After struggling to maintain it for one and a half years, because the two stores involved too much manpower and cost, Qiqi's vintage store has come to the verge of "closing". The well-known self-media person "Half Buddha Immortal" has set a record of "opening 10 stores and turning 10 stores".
But it is precisely because of the efforts of groups of entrepreneurs to use small shops as the starting point of their careers that small shops will become a new engine for economic recovery and reshape the "neighborhood" of the city, which is gradually disappearing.
If the high-tech industry represents the "ceiling" of China's economy, then the small shops rooted in the entire land of China like strong grass can probably be regarded as the "ballast stone" of national economic life - not only to support the people's firewood, rice, oil and salt in daily life, but also to support the necessary back road for ordinary people when making a living, to keep daily life, stabilize employment, and protect people's livelihood, light, flexible and tenacious.
There is no doubt that the small shop is light, but its energy is enormous.
According to data released by the State Administration for Market Regulation, by the end of 2023, there were 124 million registered individual industrial and commercial households in China, supporting the employment of nearly 300 million people in China. This means that even if you don't count the "reserve army" of the small shop economy like Azou, self-employed people with doors and households account for two-thirds of the total number of business entities today. The small shop economy is flowing with tremendous energy throughout China.
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In 2020, the Ministry of Commerce and other seven departments jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Action to Promote the Small Shop Economy" (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice") to cultivate a number of pilot cities and promote the transformation and upgrading of small shop agglomeration areas such as communities, wholesale markets, modern business districts, and characteristic blocks by carrying out the promotion of the small shop economy. On the one hand, they are actively reducing taxes and fees, and on the other hand, they are also creating various consumption scenarios to make small shops completely popular.
As the capillary of the market economy, the small store is connected to thousands of industries, and it is also the terminal of new productivity, reflecting the economic vitality of the consumer society in real time.
In particular, with the emergence of new economic forms such as live streaming, e-commerce, and food delivery in the digital economy, the operation and content of small shops have become diverse, benefiting far more people than before. Some people are happy to become a member of the "new individual economy" and find the starting point of their personal career; Some people may not necessarily open a store, but they can also benefit from the wave of the small shop economy and find their place along the tentacles of the mobile Internet.
For example, the total number of riders registered on Meituan and Ele.me platforms exceeded 10 million last year. According to the 2022 Meituan Rider Social Responsibility Report on Protecting the Rights and Interests of Riders, 81.6% of the riders who received income from Meituan in 2022 were rural migrant laborers from county-level rural areas, and 280,000 were from key counties supported by the National Rural Revitalization Program.
The increase in the number of riders means a steady economic and social recovery, and it is still necessary to deal with the employment test carefully. However, as the most subtle unit of the real economy, the small shop economy has obviously played the role of the "bottom", and in today's ups and downs of the global economic cycle, it has steadily supported the way out for ordinary people to make a living.
Four years after the issuance of the "Notice", which contributed to the small shop economy, people have really felt the return of the "neighborhood" from consumer life, and the small shop economy has achieved great success. But this success goes far beyond economic significance.
In 1986, Ho Cham Records & Electrical Store opened in Xinqiao District, Macau, and it has been nearly 40 years. As the name suggests, half of the business of this small shop is to sell records, and the other half is to sell all kinds of large and small household appliances. According to the book "Reminiscences of Small Shops: An Oral History of Old Shops in Macao" edited by Macao scholar Lin Faqin, from vinyl records to DVDs, Ho Cham Records and Electronics Company has witnessed the development of recording technology in Macao, but due to the spread of pirated records, the whole store was left with only "electricity" in the mid-90s of the 20th century.
Fortunately, at that time, household appliances were not only needed by locals, but also souvenirs that mainland tourists often brought back when they traveled to Macao. Today, many Macau people have become accustomed to going north to buy electrical appliances in the "reverse". But in the lives of local citizens, liquefied petroleum gas stoves, electric water heaters, small audio sets, tape recorders, fans, juicers, irons, ...... These goods still rely on the support of local small shops, and the relatively high cost of online shopping makes many "He Zhan" small stores not have to be abandoned in a hurry by the torrent of the times.
Compared with mainland cities that have experienced rapid urbanization in a short period of time, Macao's urban fabric is more like a solidified acquaintance society. But this kind of local life that relies on small neighborhood shops is no stranger to us, and we have never been far away.
Macau, China, July 12, 2016. A man peeks inside the café near Rua de Cunha near Rua do Cunha in Carmo Parish (Taipa). (Photo/Su Zheng)
The so-called local life is nothing more than firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, tea, as well as piano, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, hops. It is never possible to solve all the needs of life without leaving home.
How to get citizens to use and like a street voluntarily? The advice given by scholar Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of America's Great Cities is to "arrange a sufficient number of commercial and other public places along the sidewalks, especially some shops and public places that are open at night or at night."
Even if takeaway can solve the problem of "five meals a day", ordinary people still have a rigid need to eat out, and it has nothing to do with socializing if it is not for dinner, it may just be to blow the wind by the river; On the way to eat, we may think of tailor shops, spoon shops, and watch repair shops in the depths of the alley, even though many people are used to the life of "use it and throw it away"; After dinner, we also need a barber shop within walking distance of a cool and beautiful hairstyle at a reasonable price......
There is human taste, shouting, vitality, and the so-called fireworks.