Editor’s note for Thursday, April 15, 2021

My thoughts today:

Here’s an interesting Twitter thread from comic artist, writer, and chronicler of Beijing’s music scene Krish Raghav:

Semi-important lessons learned from one year at a craft beer brewery/bar in Beijing:

Beijing’s brutal, precarious labor market has, unsurprisingly, created workers in its own image, which makes recruitment, training and managing staff turnover an absolute nightmare for most restaurants.

This is partly why restaurants jump on QR code-based ordering systems, where everything from menus to bills is (only) through a WeChat applet. It’s easier to manage turnover when staff are just supervising software rather than, say, providing the traditional idea of “service.”

In other words, the dehumanization of the dining experience is going both ways in Beijing today — guests treat staff like delivery mechanisms for their orders. Staff treat guests like data points to be “settled” on their app dashboards.

Accelerating this is Dianping’s virtual monopoly as an unholy Yelp-Groupon hybrid. It has completely warped restaurant expectations and diner behavior.

Dianping “management” can be anything between 30% and 80% of a restaurant’s marketing and customer relationship focus. Most industry chat is how to “hack” or manage Dianping ratings, reviews and visibility. It’s all-important.

Dianping has created, in the diner, a kind of advanced poster’s brain. People review and rate EVERYTHING. It’s, then, impossible for many to differentiate between “I didn’t like this” and “this is bad.”

That said, many things are, indeed, bad.

Our word of the day is Dianping, the restaurant rating website mentioned above (点评 diǎn píng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief