Alone on Lovers’ Day in China? Gift yourself a dried flower, or better yet, indulge in a cake shaped like a “single dog.”
Eating by yourself? A restaurant will sit a teddy bear across from you.
As couples coo over each other today, several businesses in China are wooing a single population that might be unlucky with love, but has money to spend.
While Valentine’s Day is on Feb. 14 in much of the world, Taiwan and China celebrate their version during the Qixi Festival, which falls on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar.
Couples go on dinner dates and exchange flowers and cards. Then there are the “single dogs,” as they are nicknamed in China.
Nearly 200 million people are not married in the country of about 1.4 billion, according to official figures, many resisting family and cultural pressure to settle down.
However, businesses have something else for them.
One of the nation’s most popular hotpot restaurants, Haidilao, will place a teddy bear across from customers who dine alone.
The bear can make customers “feel at home ... not isolated and treated with warmth,” Haidilao restaurant manager Xu Bi told reporters, adding that this service mainly targets younger customers.
For those with a sweet tooth, the Seven Color Rainbow bakery makes a cake in the shape of a pooch with his tongue out.
Dubbed “the single dog,” the dessert is 20 percent more expensive than the shop’s more common cake, but it accounts for 15 percent of sales.
“People buy these cakes for their friends as a benign joke,” a staffer surnamed Liu said.
Even the US fast food chain Burger King is offering a special discount meal just for singles on Lovers’ Day: a burger, a fried chicken thigh and a smoothie.
At his flower shop, An Shuai offers singles dried roses encased in glass, which he believes will be a hit.
“People love to celebrate these festivals and single people can also give flowers to themselves,” An said.
A range of businesses are targeting singles, including travel, dining, online video games, online video streaming, sports apparel and cosmetics, said Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group and author of the book The War for China’s Wallet.
Travel agency Lvmama was quoted in the People’s Daily as saying that the number of bookings for people without a companion rose nearly twofold in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year.
In the first 11 months of last year, solo travelers accounted for 15 percent of the millions of travelers monitored by Ctrip, China’s largest online travel agency, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
“More widespread among the young and single population, traveling alone has become a way for people to realize their spiritual pursuit,” Ctrip tourism business department chief marketing officer Shi Yuduan was quoted as saying.
Zhou Kai, 29, feels greater freedom while being single.
“Without the restraint from a relationship or marriage, I can engage more time in personal interests and hobbies and spend more,” Zhou said.
The high-earning urban female population is a major economic player.
Online flower retailer Reflower says nearly 80 percent of weekly orders come from female customers, more than half of whom buy flowers to “comfort themselves.”
“Females who are single especially spend most of their paycheck. Males tend to save more, because they want to buy a house later on,” Rein said.
“It’s really being empowered by women, because they are the most optimistic consumers, they tend to have higher paying jobs than men, and they tend to spend more,” he added.
However, China is concerned about the accelerating drop in its working-age population, a consequence of its declining fertility rate and one-child policy, which was relaxed to two in 2015.
China’s Communist Youth League has started to organize blind dates for young people in a bid to encourage them to settle down.
In Tianjin alone, the local league committee has arranged blind dates involving 340 people in four venues across the city in the run-up to the Qixi Festival.
“In urban areas especially, parents are saying to their girls ‘don’t settle.’ Only marry if you want to marry, only have kids if you want to have kids,” Rein said, adding that the phenomenon signals social progress.
“I view that as showing female empowerment... I think it’s a very healthy shift, showing more male-female gender equality than ever before,” he said.
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