Source: Snow Leopard Finance Agency
Author: Gao Yue
Like a mirror falling from the sky, Manner, who was caught in the storm of public opinion, made the anxiety and embarrassment of specialty coffees trying to hide behind exquisite signs, in the counter and under the latte art, and was shaken to the ground.
People suddenly found that the specialty coffees that were once labeled as petty bourgeoisie, delicate and loose are no longer what they remember. White receipts are spread all over the counter, the garbage is too late to be cleaned up, the store echoes with the sound of the machine announcing "the order is coming", the busy clerk is eager to step on the hot wheels, and the takeaway brother is waiting anxiously.
From products, pricing to human efficiency, specialty coffee stumbles to follow in the footsteps of Luckin, but fails to live like Luckin. Today, employees trapped in the system are making the dignity they once struggled to maintain vulnerable.
This may be becoming more and more evident in our recent days:
- From products, prices, people to the way they do business, specialty coffee people are learning from Luckin in all aspects.
- The price war of 9.9 yuan swept the industry, and the specialty coffee that had experienced the highlight moment lived in the shadow of Luckin.
- The coffee industry is moving towards mass and affordability, and learning from Luckin to become a specialty coffee with "four dislikes" may drive itself to a dead end.
01.
Only by learning from Luckin can we survive
A barista who has worked at both Manner and Luckin said, "Manner is becoming more and more like Luckin."
"If at Luckin, the barista is a fully automatic keyman, then at Manner, we are a 'latte art machine'." He said this in an interview.
Like Luckin, Manner emphasizes speed and human efficiency. The barista works at the Manner store in a business district in Guangzhou, with a daily turnover of about 5,000 yuan, and is equipped with only one barista and one part-time employee. Every day, he needs to make an average of 300 cups of coffee every 3 minutes to complete the task.
He said that in the past, he thought that latte art was an art, but then he only hoped that customers would ask for a simpler latte art, "which can save dozens of seconds more."
Customers queue up for coffee
Source: Manner's official account
M Stand, another specialty coffee chain brand, is also racing against time to learn from Luckin.
A part-time barista at an M Stand store in downtown Shanghai said that she came here with the mentality of learning to make coffee, but in fact, during the peak season, the baristas were so busy that they didn't even have time to clean up the garbage on the table.
As she is also responsible for packing and ordering, she describes it, "I'm more of a handyman than a barista." ”
In specialty coffee shops, it is difficult for part-time baristas to have the opportunity to get their hands on coffee, because the brand is learning from Luckin's systematic management, and "some losses that I didn't care much about in the past are starting to be noticed."
According to a barista, in the process of making coffee, the 30-second extraction and the final latte art can make mistakes, resulting in a new one.
In the past, this kind of attrition was normal and no one would have cared about it. But now, the store needs to take inventory on a daily and weekly basis, explain the wear and tear that is out of range, and some that are not logged into the system need to be recorded on paper. Once there is a lot of loss, the barista will be criticized by the store manager.
The store monitoring system is always running, watching and recording the every move of the store staff, and the slightest carelessness will be deducted points.
M Stand咖啡
Source: M Stand official account
In terms of products and prices, specialty coffee is also aligning with Luckin.
In the past two years, when Luckin's raw coconut latte overturned the industry, the "disdainful" specialty coffee has embraced milk coffee and fruit coffee. For example, Manner's fancy American, M Stand's sesame latte, Tom Yum Gong sparkling American, and Seesaw's new coffee, fruit, and plant-based milk mix-and-match.
Many consumers find that "blocking the packaging, it is easy to recognize the specialty coffee product as Luckin".
According to the Penguin Intelligence Tank consumer research data, in the past, the reasonable price of specialty coffee was 50 yuan. But now, the pricing range of Tims coffee is 15~18 yuan, and the price range of Manner is 15~25 yuan, and you can reduce it by another 5 yuan if you bring your own cup.
A white-collar worker in Shanghai now has a coffee consumption habit of buying a cup of Luckin on the way to work, and then taking a cup of Manner downstairs for afternoon tea, "which adds up to the same cost as coffee in the past".
Specialty coffee people are forming a new consensus: only by learning from Luckin can we survive.
02.
There is no business without price reduction, and there is no way to survive without price reduction
Some people describe their initial impression of specialty coffee from a description in Guo Jingming's "Little Times":
"Countless Oriental faces in Starbucks hurriedly picked up the coffee bags they had taken out, pushed open the glass and walked away, half took out the coffee and drank it in a hurry, half carefully carried it to the boss's office."
In the minds of many people, specialty coffee once represented a petty-bourgeois, modern lifestyle, and specialty coffee was also happy to flaunt its differences. Seesaw has repeatedly emphasized that it wants to be "the lululemon of the coffee industry".
The packaging of coffee beans and the rendering of the environmental atmosphere are two powerful tools to highlight the "sense of quality". In the words of Li Peng, CEO of the coffee roasting company Magic Beans:
Coffee is half taste, half feeling.
Walk into almost every specialty coffee shop and you'll find an introduction to the beans, including region, variety, processing and cupping flavor. Some will be specially highlighted in the packaging design, and some will be specially equipped with a coffee bean exhibition area, which also has a product booklet.
The feel is based on exquisite décor, soft lighting and artistic displays.
S.ENGINE, a local specialty coffee brand in Shanghai, has leased a two-storey Shikumen building in Xintiandi, Shanghai, which is more like a concert hall than a café. Another specialty coffee brand, has a variety of green coffee beans and cooked beans on one wall, and books on the other, including baking magazines in Japanese and novels by Haruki Murakami.
For a while, boutique cafes and their distinctive latte art were popular photos on social media.
Manner Shanghai Golden City Road store, many customers drink coffee while drinking,
While admiring the ginkgo Source: Manner's official account
But the emergence of Luckin changed the situation.
One barista interviewed mentioned that she worked as a barista at Seesaw and M Stand in a business district in Shanghai, which includes most of the common coffee brands, and business is good.
A few years ago, Luckin expanded its stores on a large scale and dropped a "bomb" in this coffee encirclement, and I could feel a significant decline in orders. She said,
"Every time Luckin gives out a coupon, the business in the store is reduced by half. The few customers who come to the store are basically just to sit and talk about work. ”
Last year, the price war between Luckin and Cudi for 9.9 yuan went all the way from spring to summer. This year, the two brands added 15,000 new stores throughout the year, becoming the main force driving the growth of the coffee market. In Shanghai, the city with the strongest coffee flavor, there are more than 1,300 Luckin stores, more than the number of specialty coffee stores such as Seesaw, M Stand, and Peet's Coffee combined.
Specialty coffee companies are faced with the situation of "no price reduction, no business, no price reduction, no way to live".
Tims pulled the price to 9.9 yuan, Seesaw launched activities on third-party platforms, and the unit price of customers dropped from 30 yuan to 20 yuan or even 9.9 yuan, and M stand and Manner also followed up with discounts.
Even so, the harbingers of "death" and decline inevitably came.
Since late last year, Seesaw has closed nearly 40 stores in four months. Pacific Coffee, which used to be the second largest coffee market in China, closed more than 200 stores in three years. Peet's and Algebra's also had a different number of stores closed.
The specialty coffees shrouded in the shadow of Luckin have to learn from Luckin step by step and try to live like Luckin.
03.
If you blindly learn from Luckin, you may learn to become "four dislikes"
Learning from Luckin is not an easy task.
At the heart of specialty coffee is people, and the semi-automatic coffee machines used in these stores are highly dependent on baristas and require high recruitment and training costs. It takes "at least two years" to train a barista who can basically complete all kinds of latte art and coffee skills. Before opening the store every day, the barista also needs to remix and calibrate the machine.
Make coffee
Source: Photo.com
Once you try to open a large number of stores, the number of baristas is insufficient, and quality control problems can easily occur. Perhaps because of this, Blue bottle, known as the "leader of the specialty coffee wave", has only more than 100 stores around the world.
Open the social platform, and you can see the quality control complaints about specialty coffee everywhere. Some people complained about "stepping on thunder", some people shared their unpleasant consumption experiences, and finally came to a similar conclusion, "Today's coffee maker is a newbie who can't be newer".
It is understood that various brands are hiring baristas at any time, but the recruitment speed often cannot keep up with the speed of resignation. When employees are busy like machines, conflicts between baristas and customers are common.
One respondent, who has been in the coffee industry for eight or nine years, said he had worked for a number of specialty coffee brands. In the past two years, he feels that brands have slowly changed:
"The regular customers are gone, everyone will no longer chat, they are very strangers to each other, and they can no longer experience the joy of making coffee."
So, he decided to go back to his hometown and open a small shop on his own. In his opinion, the specialty coffee people who blindly learn Luckin are likely to learn the "four dislikes" and drive themselves to a dead end.
According to the China Urban Coffee Development Report, as of March 2024, there are a total of 52,308 domestic chain coffee stores, of which Luckin and Cudi account for half of the total (47%). According to Meituan data, the unit price of coffee group buyers nationwide dropped from 34.4 yuan in 2021 to 13.8 yuan last year.
The coffee industry has long since shed its high-end coat, and the best-selling coffee at the moment is the mass-public, affordable coffee of about 15 yuan.
But the operating costs of specialty coffee are difficult to come down. Compared with Luckin, the cost of rent, decoration, machinery, raw materials and other costs of specialty coffee are much higher. Some people mentioned that according to the basic configuration standards, "the light double-head extraction coffee machine, grinder, hand brewing equipment and various machines will cost at least 150,000 ~ 200,000 yuan".
The cost of a single cup of Cudi calculated by Ping An Securities is 9.55 yuan, and the cost of a single cup of Luckin calculated by many media is about 10 yuan. This is a depression that is difficult for specialty coffee to explore.
Lucky Coffee officially announced that coffee is 6.6 yuan
Source: Lucky Coffee official account
Cudi, which has an unlimited promotion of 9.9 yuan for all drinks, is ready for the "whole 9.9" to last for 3 years. Lucky Coffee, a subsidiary of Mixue Bingcheng, announced the opening of the "6.6 yuan" era of coffee. Specialty coffees, which can't roll up the price and can't compete for sales, are about to usher in the next round of challenges.
Last year, the average annual coffee consumption of Chinese rose to 16.74 cups, which is still far from the global average of 75.2 cups. Starbucks CEO Nathham said the coffee market in China is still in its early stages. Starbucks has also reiterated many times that it did not participate in the 9.9 price war. "Our promotional products are mainly focused on new products that have just been launched."
Before considering how many of these opportunities can be seized, the specialty coffee people who are crawling on the road to learning Luckin must first let themselves live.