There is an online buzzword: I have walked the longest road, which is your routine. Now, it may have to be changed to: "The longest queue I have ever stood in is all for child care."
Especially in some tea shops, doughnut shops, Guo Kui shops and other snack bars, and even at the door of hot pot restaurants, it is often seen that there are many people waiting in line at any time, and some even have 40-50 people waiting in line. "The line is too long, and the road can’t be lined up!" People can’t help but sprout. Are these people in line really queuing? Or a fake queue?
Even at noon when the outdoor temperature is 39℃, there is always a long queue in front of a snack bar named "Beef Youmo" in Dakejia Lane, Chunxi Business Circle, Chengdu. From July 10 to July 12, Huaxi Dushi Bao-cover journalists chose the methods of on-site squatting, shooting videos and unannounced visits, trying to expose the truth behind them.
doubtful point
The average taste of beef oil is 7 people, and each time they buy one, they queue up repeatedly.
During the summer vacation, Mr. Chen from Guangdong took his children and his family of three to Chengdu to play. When passing Dakejia Lane in Chunxi Road business circle, he was attracted by a queue of more than 30 meters long in front of a snack bar named "Beef Youmo", and intuitively judged that the cakes in this store should be very delicious.
Walking into this small shop of about 10 square meters, two or three employees are busy in the shop. On the wall, there are all kinds of flavors of beef oil (similar to Guo Kui but with more fillings), and the prices are all in 10 yuan. If it weren’t for the long queue, this old-fashioned shop would be unremarkable at all.
At noon, the outdoor temperature is close to 40℃. Mr. Chen asked his wife and children to wait on the bench and queue up by themselves.
The reporter estimated that it was Mr. Chen’s turn to buy from 12: 50 until 1: 30. "It tastes just so-so. I don’t think it’s worth waiting in such a long line to buy food."
"There are still few people now, and there are more people on weekends or holidays." A man in white short sleeves shouted hard. "Bake now and sell now, come on, let’s take advantage of the fact that there are fewer people in the queue now … …” When people come in line, the lead conductor will quickly step forward, collect money, and then give customers bags to wait in line.
From July 10th to 11th, from 12 noon to 17: 00, reporters were on the scene for two days. There are at least 12 people in the queue, and more than 20 people, most of whom are tourists with foreign accents.
In the tens of meters long queue, there are also some tourists who give up queuing and leave halfway. However, during the four or five hours of squatting, the reporter found a strange phenomenon: at least seven people were waiting in line from 1 o’clock until the reporter left. These include three women traveling together, a man and a woman traveling together and two separate men. Different from other tourists, these seven people appear to be with an easy grace, unhurried, and some of them are either playing mobile phones or whispering to each other, talking and laughing. The reporter roughly estimated that the seven people had lined up at least four or five times in the whole afternoon, and even seven or eight times.
Their behavior and trajectory are also surprisingly consistent: queuing and buying only one. After buying it, they didn’t eat it directly, but left slowly in the direction of a large supermarket nearby. After about 10 minutes, these people returned to the queue. Then, the beef oil in their hands disappeared. The reporter noticed that these seven people will not appear in the team at the same time. Generally, three or four people will line up at a time and repeat the cycle.
survey
Two days before and after, four people all lined up to buy cakes and went to the same place.
The behavior of these people is full of doubts. If you buy beef oil, why not buy enough at once, but go to the queue four or five times and buy only one at a time? They left with beef oil and returned in just 10 minutes. Did they eat the food or where did they go? With these doubts, all the reporters continued to observe at the door of the store, and the other reporters followed the footsteps of these people all the way to see where they went.
Time: 12 noon on July 10th — twenty past five p.m.
The reporter first noticed four people. A man in grey short sleeves, jeans and khaki sandals. At 13: 59, he appeared in the queue, holding a paper bag in his right hand. In front of him, a trio of women appeared together, in which a tall woman wore a flowered skirt, a short-haired woman wore denim shorts and white short sleeves, and another middle-aged woman wore green short sleeves, which was very conspicuous.
About 20 minutes later, each of the three young women left with a beef oil, passed by the door of a large shopping mall nearby, and then entered the first city, passing through a 1-meter-wide passage next to the entrance of the parking lot of Kejia Building at No.48 Zhengkejia Lane, and then entered a small door. In less than 10 minutes, three people came out of this door empty-handed. Subsequently, the gray short-sleeved man also entered this small door. After more than 10 minutes, they appeared in the queue again.
From 12 noon to 5: 20 pm, the reporter found that there were at least seven people who participated in the queue for three times, most of them were gray short-sleeved men and trio, and they went back and forth at least four or five times. When the queue was the largest, there were 20 people in the queue, 7 of whom were "old faces".
Time: 1: 00 noon on July 11th — 4 p.m.
At 1 pm on July 11, the reporter went to the scene for investigation again. As the day before, there was still a long queue here. The clerk in white short sleeves who is in charge of collecting money and directing the queue is still the same shouting words.
Soon, the reporter found that several people who appeared the day before appeared again. In the women’s trio, the flowered skirt was replaced by a yellow striped skirt, the short-haired woman with denim shorts, and the white short sleeves were replaced by blue short sleeves, while the middle-aged woman with green short sleeves wore white short sleeves. A men’s gray short sleeves turned into dark shirts. Since 2 o’clock, these four people have walked back and forth three or four times along the route of the previous day.
Different from the day before, the reporter noticed that several new faces appeared. After combing the two-day investigation, nearly 10 "customers" in this store are suspected of being childcare.
Starting from the bottom
A special company organizes fake queues for 10 times a day with a monthly salary of 1,500 yuan.
What is the identity of these childcare, and where did they come from? In order to solve these puzzles, the reporter immediately contacted the clerk in charge of collecting money and directing the queue on the grounds of part-time job. At the scene, the clerk refused at first, saying that they didn’t need to recruit part-time jobs. It may be considered that there are too many people on the scene, and then he asked reporters to add WeChat communication first.
Looking through his circle of friends, in the past year, almost all of them have shown off small videos and photos of long queues in the store. For example, on July 5, he proudly said in the video: More than 30 people lined up in the rain on rainy days, too many people! For example, on May 5, there was a long queue of nearly forty or fifty people in the video. He said, "The queue is too long, and the road can’t be lined up!"
The reporter repeatedly asked the clerk to directly recruit himself for a part-time job, but he was rejected.
He said that all the people in the queue are sent by intermediary companies every day, and the store can’t directly recruit people. He added that there is a group of intermediary companies with more than 200 people who signed up at 6 o’clock the day before and only recruited the top 20 people.
He further explained that if he really wants to do it, he can take the reporter to see the boss of a part-time company and then enter his group. "You can ask him to arrange it for you every day."
In fact, it’s not just queuing that involves fraud. At first, the shop assistant asked the reporter about his height, and said that if the height and other conditions were good, singers who participated in some activities could "lip-synch".
The survey found that these intermediary companies are very mature. On the one hand, by recruiting a large number of part-time staff, and then "selling" in batches. Some stores that need "child care", the intermediary company is responsible for sending a batch of "child care" every day, and the price ranges from tens to hundreds of yuan. After the role "playing" is completed, we can pay the fee quickly by means of WeChat transfer, and the intermediary earns the difference for a living.
Vertical depth
Consumers Association, lawyers say: This is consumer fraud!
Lawyer Chen Fengfeng of Sichuan Yingji Law Firm believes that operators hire people to queue up, which means that operators use asymmetric transaction information to artificially create the phenomenon of people queuing, create an illusion that products are popular with the public and business is prosperous, and use people’s curiosity and conformity psychology to gain good reputation and benefits. Legally speaking, this is a kind of consumer fraud, that is, by covering up the real situation of commodity sales, the operator deceives consumers to mistakenly trust the quality of the commodity and consume it.
The reporter called the industrial and commercial complaint 12315 consumer hotline to reflect, and the staff said: it is fraudulent for snack bars to hire people to queue up to induce consumers to consume. The public should actively report such things, and whether the snack bar behavior involves illegality needs further verification.