Visitors become players, markets brew coffee: the experience economy's new tricks

Consumption is changing profoundly today — consumers pay not only for goods but willingly for unique experiences and emotional feeling. The experience economy is blooming everywhere; what new tricks does it hide?

Immersive market

Visitors turn from “onlookers” into “players in the drama”

During the festival, an antique-style market by Eastern Cloud Lake in Changzhou, Jiangsu lit up the night. At its entrance, a “Chang’e” in Hanfu stepped forward with an ancient greeting; following her, visitors embarked on a “time-travel” garden party.

In the lanes, a wine-shop “wine pourer” in period costume performed the traditional wine-pouring craft.

In Changzhou, drinking osmanthus rice wine at Mid-Autumn is a long-standing custom; locals deliberately restored the stalls to look like ancient wine shops, inviting a local intangible-heritage sweet-rice-wine brand to set up. Visitors vied to taste: “Very good, sweet on the palate. Antique and full of feeling.”

The market’s liveliest spot was the “flying-flower order” literary gathering, where NPCs dressed as Su Dongpo invited passersby to trade poems. Every visitor who interacted with an NPC earned a “Cloud-Lake coin” — one coin worth one yuan, redeemable at stalls selling sweet rice wine, mooncakes or cultural products.

The market’s hands-on zone let visitors make mooncakes and lanterns, drawing many foreign friends to try. German visitor Christian Schmidt said he loves Chinese culture and the immersive experience let him feel traditional Chinese culture.

The immersive play experience is free to visitors and tangibly drove merchant revenue. The market’s 17 merchants topped 70,000 yuan in single-evening sales. The intangible-heritage sweet rice wine sold over 200 orders in one session, with two emergency restocks; overall market sales reached 3–4 times an ordinary market.

Merchants put intangible-heritage explanation, live performance and tasting experience ahead of selling; once the scene is built, consumption happens naturally. When visitors leave, they take not just food and crafts but a time-travel memory.

Firework market

New experiences under a refreshed space

A wet market is among the most ordinary consumption places in life, yet in this Beijing market, besides vegetables and fruit, hides a pour-over coffee shop. How does the market pour-over taste?

Following the coffee aroma, the reporter found this pour-over shop. Small as it is, it loses no refinement; a dozen-plus coffee beans line the open bar. For a little over ten yuan you can buy a cup of pour-over — sipping coffee on the way to buying groceries, finding relaxed leisure in the market’s earthly bustle, attracts many nearby residents.

The clerk said an over-80-year-old customer once came for coffee, a first encounter that was a bit of a surprise. Now overall sales are very good; they plan to open a branch in Xiamen.

This isn’t the only café opened inside a market. A specialty pour-over in a Chengdu market breaks coffee’s “bourgeois and aloof” label. It’s not only a new choice for nearby office workers but tourists from Shenzhen visiting Chengdu come specifically to experience a “market coffee.”

What impressed Wenxin wasn’t just the location but the pricing by-the-bean, weighed by the gram, with sugar and milk charged separately — buying coffee feels like buying vegetables.

A cup of coffee brews a sense of ease. Founder Yang Peiheng thinks coffee is also a roasted good, fitting the market’s logic. Many coffee fanatics say buying beans in the market lets you enjoy the roasting process — heat, time, aroma, the combination and control of variables is full of delight, an immersive experience online shopping can’t offer.

The experience economy’s heat shows that consumption concepts are changing. What consumers seek is no longer just owning a product, but emotional resonance and a one-of-a-kind life experience.

Commercial competition no longer merely compares price and scale, but scene and warmth — reading the public’s emotional needs, turning an ordinary purchase into a memorable, personal memory. The experience economy keeps unlocking domestic-demand potential, meeting people’s yearning for a better life.

Supervising editor: Du Yang

Producer: Chai Zhehong, Yu Hao

Chief editor: Xiong Manlin

Editor: Ling Wenfang

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