Prices have hit rock bottom. The entire street can't find any fast food above $20, they're all $9.9.

These days, I don’t know who is saying that the restaurant business is still very profitable nowadays. When we go to the market, we often see chaos everywhere. Is there still a place with a very good consumption atmosphere and booming restaurant business? Honestly, I haven’t seen such places in many areas. Even in a big city like Shanghai, there are very few.

In the past, the overall environment was good, everyone had money, and they were willing to spend, even to borrow from the future. Many young people were also willing. So, even if some restaurants charged high prices, like a certain noodle shop charging 40 yuan per bowl, people still wanted to spend. The number of such restaurants kept increasing, and many people didn’t think it was expensive back then.

But now, it’s different. When you look at these restaurants now, their business is far from as lively as before. Anyone who has been in the restaurant industry in recent years can clearly feel that the decline in consumption is very serious. The average spending per customer keeps decreasing, seemingly without a lower limit.

For example, a peer mentioned today that the current restaurant market prices seem to have hit a freezing point. The pedestrian street nearby used to have some casual dining places like tea restaurants and salad/light meals, but now, these have all disappeared and been replaced by cost-effective fast food.

What’s even more frightening is that he recently noticed that whether it’s newly opened fast food restaurants or those that have been around for a while, there are about thirty to forty restaurants on the street, with more than twenty of them being fast food. Surprisingly, none of these fast food places have prices above 20 yuan.

He was even surprised that almost every fast food restaurant is offering items at 9.9 yuan, like 9.9 yuan noodles, 9.9 yuan pork knuckle rice, 9.9 yuan bucket rice, etc. Of course, these are mainly for attracting customers, and they still have other higher-priced products inside. It seems that now everyone has accepted and become accustomed to this pricing strategy, doing business at these prices.

If this had happened seven or eight years ago, such a situation wouldn’t have occurred. The lowest prices back then were around 15 yuan, but now, the price has dropped to 9.9 yuan. It’s really astonishing. I don’t know whether the future will get better or worse, whether there is room for prices to rise again. What do you all think?