Every day this month, Beijing's Blue Island department store will hand out 30 free television sets and a six-day beach holiday in Thailand in a lucky draw for customers.
Desperate times call for desperate measures: profits of Chinese department stores are sinking in a spiral of deflation.
Shoppers are staying at home and leaving their money in the bank.
"We're in crisis mode," Zhu Jianping, Blue Island's deputy sales director said as customers crowded at the front door in the hope of having their names drawn from a red box in yesterday's lottery.
His boss, Li Guoxin, said revenues had dropped seven percent in the first half of this year from a year earlier.
Even in a country with a glut of television sets -- and a chronic oversupply of almost all other consumer products -- the daily give-away has set tongues wagging.
But Li reckons it is a small price to pay to attract new customers to a store with daily revenues of US$500,000.
Chinese are paragons of frugality: The savings rate is a staggering 40 percent. Cumulatively, those savings add up to 5.92 trillion yuan (US$715.2 billion), the equivalent of 70 percent of gross domestic product.
Now the government is reaching for the last weapons in its anti-deflation armory to flush money out of the banks and turn savers into spendthrifts who will boost the economy by buying.
On Monday, parliament approved a 20 percent tax on bank interest earnings to spur spending by punishing those who save.
But few stores are holding their breath until the tax takes effect. Around Beijing, shops are scrambling hard to make a sale.
"I buy what I need, but not much else," said Pang Wanxiu, 62, browsing for shoes at the Blue Island store.
There are impulse buyers scattered among the shoppers.
"I haven't got any savings," said 27-year-old businessman Cui Yi, as he forked over a couple hundred yuan to buy imported lipstick for his girlfriend. "I'm already a model consumer."
But he said people like him were "probably as common as phoenix feathers and unicorns".
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