64-yuan beef jerky exposes the low-price facade of bulk snack stores, as franchisees squeezed by thin margins pass costs to consumers, with weighing tricks becoming a gray profit recovery mechanism, and the industry's rapid expansion faces a trust crisis.
When four pieces of beef jerky, originally worth just 17 yuan, were rung up at an astonishing 64 yuan at the Zhao Yiming Snacks checkout counter, this seemingly absurd cashier error completely ripped apart the facade of extreme cost-effectiveness that the bulk snack retail sector has long touted. Public opinion tends to dismiss such outrageous overcharging at the scale as the result of individual employee misconduct or an accidental malfunction of the electronic scale. But if examined within the meat grinder of the price war in the lower-tier market snack industry, it becomes clear that this is not some random customer complaint incident. Rather, it is a gray-area cash recovery mechanism that franchise stores are forced to activate just to survive, as their profit margins are squeezed to the limit.
The Inherent Disconnect Between Traffic Generation and Profitability
Reviewing the underlying logic of the bulk snack retail business model reveals an inherent disconnect between its traffic-generation and profit-making calculations. The well-known branded beverages and loss-leader packaged snacks displayed at store entrances, priced far below supermarket levels, are essentially bait designed to create a low-price perception. These standard products are barely expected to generate profit; in fact, they often operate at a loss to draw in customers. What truly supports the store's gross margin, covering the high rent and labor costs, are precisely those bulk items sold by weight—dried meat, dried fruit, and obscure white-label candies.
The Weighing Area: The Deepest Profit Black Box
The weighing area is the deepest profit black box hidden inside bulk snack stores. Since these items lack the price anchor of standard packaged units, consumers have little intuitive sense of the cost per gram. When major snack giants are fighting price wars at the front end and squeezing overall transaction values, franchisees looking to protect their razor-thin break-even point have no choice but to manipulate the high-margin bulk sections.
Four pieces of beef jerky ringing up at more than triple the expected price silently reveals the deeply distorted profit anxiety at the store level.
The Interests Game Between Headquarters and Franchisees
Tracing the expansion framework of this snack unicorn through its corporate records, the conflict of interest between headquarters and franchisees appears particularly brutal. The business registration information captured by Tianyancha clearly shows that Yichun Zhao Yiming Food Technology Co., Ltd., a corporate entity with a registered capital of only 1.02 million yuan, has made intensive outward investments in seven companies within a short period, thereby building a vast regional distribution and supply chain network.
Headquarters reaps substantial profits from franchise fees, hefty supply chain markups, and backend rebates, while its valuation in the capital markets continues to climb. But this business model, which offloads all heavy assets and operational risks onto terminal franchisees, is inherently doomed to fragility in store-level management.
Deformed Operations and an Out-of-Control Franchise Network
When franchisees realize they cannot make money following the headquarters-mandated pricing, and even face aggressive customer diversion from several competitors on the same street, deformed operational behavior becomes inevitable. The multiple litigation cases disclosed on Tianyancha—involving personal injury claims and unfair competition—are concrete snapshots of this sprawling franchise network spiraling out of control. The frenetic pace of store openings masks a severe shortage of regional supervision, and food safety red lines and compliance standards are silently breached under the survival pressures faced by grassroots stores.
The End of the Low-Price Illusion
That 64-yuan beef jerky is a heavy blow signaling the end of the wild-growth era of bulk snack retail. The low-price perception cultivated by capital injection is, at its core, an unsustainable traffic-subsidy game. As the industry enters a brutal phase of fighting over an existing pie, the strategy of simply squeezing franchisee profits to maintain surface-level prosperity no longer works.
If true efficiency cannot be squeezed out of the deep end of the supply chain, and terminal stores are still allowed to exploit weighing tricks to fleece consumers, then those snack empires built on rapid market expansion will inevitably collapse entirely under the backlash of shattered consumer trust.
