Source: see column
For a long time, the catering industry has been regarded as the representative of the service industry, and to put it bluntly, it is a typical example of the tertiary industry. However, a recent incident at the Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan store in Nanjing gives people the impression that the "service" of some service industries is a bit outrageous.
According to media reports, recently, a consumer took his family to the Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan Gate for coffee and ended up trapped in the private room because the lock could not be unlocked. Finally, the staff of the coffee shop asked the customer to pay for the lock.
It is difficult for consumers to accept that, whether from the point of view of the safety of the individual going to the coffee shop, or from the analysis of the reasons why the door lock cannot be opened, it is clear that the responsibility lies with the coffee shop, not the customer. This behavior of the coffee shop is not only unacceptable to the parties, but also indignant to many netizens who saw the news.
So, this phenomenon of Blue Bay Coffee reflects some problems in the industry, whether it happens accidentally or has some potential reasons.Aovslot? If we peel off the cocoon, we may be able to find the answer.
one
He was trapped in a private room because of a coffee shop, but he had to pay 300 yuan to open the lock.
According to media reports, Mr. Zhou, a citizen of Nanjing, recently booked a V1 private room at the Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan store, took his family to spend, and finally ordered two light meals and tea at the scene according to the minimum standard of 298 yuan. However, during this period, when Mr. Zhou tried to go to the bathroom, he accidentally found that the door of the private room could not be opened. When Mr. Zhou still could not unlock the lock after several attempts, he rang the service bell on his desk.
Photo Source: modern KuaiBao Weibo (Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan Gate Store)
However, when the staff arrived at the door of the private room, they found that the door could not be opened from the outside. As a result, Mr. Zhou and his family were "trapped" in the private room. It is worth mentioning that in the process of communicating with the waiter, Mr. Zhou also asked whether the private room key could be used to open the door. However, the other party said that the staff of the coffee shop had never seen the key to the door of the private room.
In the end, the waiter had to find some tools on the spot and try to open the lock himself. Unexpectedly, the door lock of the private room could not be opened all the time. In desperation, Mr. Zhou suggested that if he really could not open it, he could ask a professional master to open the lock. However, the thinking waiter outside the door told Mr. Zhou that if you please start the master to open the lock, the related expenses need to be borne by Mr. Zhou.
Forced by the helplessness of being trapped in a private room, Mr. Zhou could only promise to pay for unlocking himself. Therefore, after the lock master successfully opened the lock, Mr. Zhou paid 300 yuan to the master. According to the master of the lock, the lock of the private room is broken because it has been used for too long. However, if there is a spare key, the lock in the room can be opened from the outside under normal circumstances.
This also means that the lock of the private room can not be unlocked, and Mr. Zhou is not responsible for the damage, and the party responsible for this incident is the Blue Bay Coffee Shop. From this point of view, it does not make sense to let the customer bear the cost of unlocking.
In response, some netizens even said that when consumers came to Blue Bay to consume coffee, they were trapped because of the door lock, which may have delayed their time to leave the coffee shop, and the coffee shop may also compensate them for the loss of time and mental loss caused by the sudden "trapped" incident.
What is surprising is that Mr. Zhou had no choice but to investigate these responsibilities at that time, but lost an additional 300 yuan because of unlocking the lock. Moreover, the cost is 2 yuan higher than the 298 yuan spent in the coffee shop. This is obviously intolerable to the average consumer.
Image source: network, screenshot of payment provided by the parties when interviewed by the media
Before leaving, Mr. Zhou found a waiter and hoped that the coffee shop could give an explanation. However, the other party said that they can "compensate" consumers by giving small gifts. Perhaps Mr. Zhou felt that the value of the small gift was not equal to his loss of 300 yuan, so he refused directly. However, the hotel did not contact Mr. Zhou afterwards, and the incident came to nothing.
Since then, Wang Xiaoyan, director of the Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan store, said in an interview with the media: "I was not there that day, and later I heard about it, and I didn't pay much attention to it, but we really mishandled it."
According to media reports, after the incident was noticed by the reporter, the store manager also admitted to mishandling, apologized by phone on the spot, and refunded the 300 yuan unlocking fee paid by Mr. Zhou that day through online payment.
In this regard, professional lawyers also said that in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, operators, managers, or organizers of mass activities in hotels, shopping malls, banks, stations, airports, stadiums, places of entertainment, and other places of operation and public places, if they fail to fulfill their security obligations and cause damage to others, shall bear tort liability. It is also reasonable that the unlocking fee is borne by the coffee shop.
On the one hand, as the operator of the service place, the Blue Bay Coffee Zhongshan store trapped consumers in the private room because its hardware facilities did not meet the safety standards; on the other hand, after the trapped security incident, the coffee shop did not take a negative action and did not provide a spare key, so it was considered that it had not fulfilled the relevant prevention obligations.
two
There are loopholes in the management of Blue Bay Coffee, and there are frequent complaints about store membership card service.
According to early media reports, Blue Bay Coffee not only has the problems of store lock safety management and poor store service, but also has store transfer and customer stored value card has not been followed up. To this end, it has also triggered a lot of consumer complaints and complaints.
For example, Niuka, a TV program focused on protecting consumers' rights and interests, once reported that in the second half of 2021, Mr. Bao complained that he had bought a stored value card of 5000 yuan at Blue Bay Coffee (Jinsheng Road Shop) and spent about 300 yuan on that day. However, he has not been to this Blue Bay Coffee since.
However, when he came to the coffee shop to spend money again in February 2024, the head of the coffee shop said that the coffee shop had changed several owners, the membership system had been updated, the membership card information could not be found in the past, and Mr. Bao's stored value card could no longer be used.
Photo Source: screenshot of NBS Nanjing Radio and Television Niuka exposure Station
Mr. Bao said he could not accept or agree with this explanation. Because although the store is transferred, it is still the brand of Blue Bay Coffee, so I hope to continue to use the balance in the card.
In fact, the dispute over the use of stored value cards and membership cards in Blue Bay Coffee stores is not an isolated case. As early as 2019, there were media reports that Mr. Wei, a citizen of Nanjing, was a regular customer of Blue Bay Coffee. He had issued a Blue Bay coffee "VIP Diamond Card" a few years ago, which had been recharged and swiped for consumption, with a total amount of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.
Unexpectedly, last year, the card suddenly couldn't be used. The clerk said there was something wrong with the machine and asked him to pay cash and wrote him a note promising to return the cash. Who would have thought that after that, Mr. Wei ran back and forth to four Blue Bay coffee shops and almost broke his legs, but the store did not refund him a penny on the grounds that the coffee shop was a franchise store.
Mr. Wei said that he was very angry that the Blue Bay Coffee Shop did not "recognize" his "VIP Diamond Card". Because there was still a balance of more than 600 yuan in the card, he planned to go to the Blue Bay Coffee Shop to return the card and asked the other party to cash the 144RMB cash marked on the "white slip". Under all kinds of helplessness, he could only complain to the Nanjing Municipal Government's "12345" hotline about this matter, and had no choice but to embark on the difficult road of safeguarding his rights.
According to news released by Blue Bay Coffee on some investment promotion websites, the first Blue Bay coffee shop opened around 2000, while by the first half of 2020, Nanjing had more than 100 chain stores throughout the city. Beijing, Hangzhou, Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Wuxi, Hefei, Nantong, Yangzhou, Huainan, Sihong, Hongze, Chengdu and other cities outside Nanjing also have more than 200 franchise stores.
Although through the introduction of the official website, we can not know the proportion of direct stores and franchise stores, but through its introduction, it is not difficult to see that this is a coffee company based on joining mode. Relevant data also show that the long-term stable consumption of Blue Bay Coffee members exceeds 1 million.
Thus it can be seen that the reason why the member management system of Blue Bay Coffee is very chaotic and the rights and interests of consumers can not be protected may be due to the low degree of digitization of its platform. In other words, the data of different stores are not completely "through". Moreover, its internal management system, which is mainly based on joining, may also have loopholes.
three
With the intensification of competition in the coffee industry, how can Blue Bay Coffee gain a foothold?
As we all know, before the rise of Luckin Coffee, the domestic coffee market was basically dominated by overseas brands Starbucks. With the development of the Internet, the advent of the new retail era and the rise of concepts such as intra-city distribution and real-time retail, unprecedented changes have taken place in the scene and demand of consumers drinking coffee.
This change even made Starbucks, which once had a differentiated position, saying that "what it sells is not coffee, but the third space", also feels a kind of business pressure coming from the mountain rain. The degree of competition in the coffee industry can be seen through the speed of store expansion of the major head brands.
According to the company's financial report and statistics from third-party research institutions, head brands such as Lucky and Starbucks have achieved high store growth, with a net increase of 8034 stores in 2023, with a store growth rate of 97.Aovslot.8%, the number of stores nearly doubled, while Starbucks had a net increase of 885 stores for the whole year of 2023 (natural year), reaching the highest pace in history. Even Coffee, a rising star in the industry, grew by 6375 stores in 2023 and 16900 stores in 13 major coffee brands in 2023, with a combined growth rate of 83.01%.
In terms of industry concentration, according to the Euromonitor report, around 2022, Starbucks and Luckin Coffee have a market share of 38% and 9% respectively. Thus it can be seen that small and medium-sized chain coffee shops such as Blue Bay Coffee can only participate in the "volume" in the remaining limited market. This also means that the brands, products and services of coffee shops will determine the future development space of this kind of brands.
From the problems shown by Blue Bay Coffee in a number of consumer complaints [download black cat complaint client], it can be inferred that Blue Bay Coffee's model may still be too traditional, whether it is the systematic and digital management of chain stores, or in terms of standardized and personalized services, it may not be comparable to lucky, Starbucks and other brands.
It can be predicted that this will also become a bottleneck in the development of established coffee shops such as Blue Bay Coffee. As a result, on the one hand, Blue Bay coffee can only live in a corner and survive in a limited market. On the other hand, it may encounter bottlenecks in performance growth due to the squeeze of strong competitors, and the future development will be more and more difficult.
four
Conclusion
Through the rapid rise of Luckin Coffee in a short period of time, and even the development process of "sharing a piece of the pie" with Starbucks, a coffee ace, we can see that Blue Bay Coffee can only embrace change if it wants to maintain its industry status and stabilize its performance scale. while paying attention to the changes in the demand of the consumer market, we also need to constantly improve our brand image, service level, and open up more channels for business promotion.
At the same time, Blue Bay Coffee may also need to be in line with the general trend of the industry in terms of Internet and digital management, instead of still using the brick-and-mortar store thinking of 10 years ago to open a "not salty" physical store. Wait for the arrival of customers, and its service level is even at the same level as a few years ago.
Perhaps only in this way, the future Blue Bay coffee, in the fierce market competition, will not be defeated, but have a place.