Story Bites

1.Long Live the Shopping Malls
2.Where your ¥7 fake Dior Lipsticks come from
3.Milk Out, Yoghurt Please
4.Many, Many Nearsighted Teens
5.Cat Rules

1.

・Consumers aged 26-35 with annual income ¥410, 000-¥500,000 shopped the most in China’s shopping malls last year.
・Geo wise, second and third-tier cities’ consumers shopped more frequently than those in first-tier cities. (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.)
・Starbucks, Apple and Zara are some of the most popular brands in shopping malls; Sephora, Nike, Swarovski, Kate Spade and Burberry are also attracting increasing number of consumers espcially females aged 25-45.

⥤ Explore⩥Article Language: Chinese
⩥Reading Effort Level: 3
(Here’s how we evaluate it: from 1-5, 1=easy no-brainer read, 5=relatively serious stuff. It’s subjective, but hopefully could give you a little reference)

2.

・In today’s Chinese cosmetics wholesale market, you can purchase counterfeit Dior Lipsticks (retails at ¥300) at ¥7, Chanel Lip Stains at ¥8, and Armani’s, more expensive, at ¥28.
・Wholesale agents usually own a network of hundreds of sale representatives who deal with Taobao and WeChat shop owners everyday. (who then sell directly to online consumers.)
・Each rep, on a good day, could easily be making more than ¥9,000 from these deals. (That’s almost $1500, in one day.)

⥤Explore

⩥Article Language: Chinese
⩥Reading Effort Level: 2

3.

・Yoghurt seems to have officially replaced milk to become the most-favored diary source for Chinese consumers.
・Shanghai is the most yoghurt-consuming city in China apparently. On average, each person in Shanghai consumes over 7kg of yoghurt every year.
・In China, people used to talk about “drinking” yoghurt due to the product’s high liquidity. In recent years, more foreign brands have brought in scoop-able, more solid-y yoghurts into the Chinese market including greek yoghurt, so now it is fashionable to say “eating” yoghurt instead.

⥤Explore

⩥Article Language: Chinese
⩥Reading Effort Level: 3

4.

・The conventional wisdom that links nearsightedness on over-reading and too much screen time no longer hold true.
・Recent scientific research shows that the less outdoor activities young children get, the more likely of them to become myopia.
(Unfortunately, Chinese kids on average get less than one hour outdoor time everyday in school including P.E. classes.)
・The “5 Minute Eye Message Exercise” which has been required as part of China’s national curriculum doesn’t seem to have any positive effect on remitting eye-related problems.

⥤Explore

⩥Article Language: Chinese
⩥Reading Effort Level: 4.5

5.

・Like in the English world, cats are dominating China’s internet like craaaazy.
・In the offline world, cats are increasingly favored by China’s young, working, single millennials as their top pet choice.
・China’s single population reached 200 million in recent years, that means 1 of 3 people in today’s workplace is single.

(And even if not single, people could still be lonely.

And who’s not lonely?

Thank god we have kittens. )

⥤Explore

⩥Article Language: Chinese
⩥Reading Effort Level: 3

 www.elephant-room.com