Quick Summary of the Key Points
Recently, two major domestic snack chain brands, Zhao Yiming and Haolai Xing, have been exposed for seriously underweighing their snacks in five provinces across the country. In the most extreme case, a 4-yuan pack of beef jerky was sold for 64.58 yuan at the store, but when weighed on a fair scale outside the store, it only weighed 17.29 yuan, representing a difference of nearly three times the price. Subsequent inspections by regulatory authorities found that out of 284 store scales, only one had technical issues. The root cause is not the malfunction of individual scales or mistakes by employees, but rather a mismatch of interests between the brand headquarters and franchisees within the franchise model, where the benefits of cheating far outweigh the costs of violations. Merchants collectively assume that consumers are too lazy to bother to check the weights. Although the brands have introduced compensation measures such as tenfold refunds, to truly solve the problem, the system must be changed to ensure that any attempt to overcharge is immediately punished.
Detailed and Easy-to-Understand Explanation
1. It's Not Just a Few Grams of Error—It's a Clear Case of Taking Advantage of Consumer Laziness
Many people initially thought it was a small mistake, such as an employee forgetting to use a tray or remove the skin from the food. However, according to national regulations, the maximum allowable error for weighing meat within 2.5 kilograms is 5 grams. The 219-gram excess in the Cangzhou case is more than 40 times the allowed error, which would require all 40 scales to malfunction simultaneously. Snack sellers target loose items because they understand consumer behavior: the prices of packaged snacks and beverages are printed on the packaging, and customers can pay directly by scanning a code, so there's no way to change the price. But with loose nuts and jerky, it's difficult to estimate the weight, and most customers don't bother to weigh the products they buy for just a few dozen yuan.
The trick is clever: overcharging by 7 or 8 yuan per order might not seem like much, and it's not worth the hassle of arguing with the staff. However, with 100 customers a day, that adds up to a significant profit. Each small overcharge might not seem significant, but over time, it's a surefire way to make a profit. People often complain about snacks costing a hundred or so yuan, but often, it's not that they bought too much; rather, the scales are rigged to do the overcharging for them.
2. Why Were Only 1 Out of 284 Scales Found to Be Defective?
When regulatory authorities inspected 284 scales, only one was found to have not been properly calibrated. This might seem like 99.6% of the scales were safe, but that's not surprising. Modern cheating scales have a feature that automatically resets them to the correct weight as soon as they are turned off and restarted. Employees can simply press a reset button before the inspectors arrive, making all scales appear to be working correctly. Even if the authorities use weights to verify, they can only prove that the scales were accurate at the time of inspection, not during normal operations. This revelation caused the market value of the two brands to plummet by nearly ten billion yuan in one day, mainly because the capital market had previously valued them based on the assumption that they would always be profitable and would continue to grow. Now that the truth about their profits has been exposed, investors are fleeing.
3. Franchisees Cheating on the Scales Indicates a Conflict of Interests with the Headquarters
Do you think Zhao Yiming and Haolai Xing own all their stores? No—of their 26,000 stores, only 6 are directly operated by the brand, with the rest being franchises. The brand's profits come from selling goods to franchisees, not from consumers. How much a franchisee sells, how they sell it, or whether they make a profit have no impact on the brand's financial reports. The competition in the industry is fierce: in small towns, there can be three stores of the same brand on the same street, and franchisees compete by lowering prices or extending opening hours, but cheating on the scales is a low-risk, high-profit strategy. The cost of cheating is minimal: according to current laws, the maximum penalty is the confiscation of the scale and a fine of 2,000 yuan. Even if a franchisee gets caught once, the profit from cheating for a month could cover the fine ten times over. Since the chances of being caught are low, it's a highly profitable scheme.
4. The Claim of “Employee Mistakes” Is a Well-Laid Cover Story
Whenever a problem occurs, the brands immediately blame individual employees for the mistakes. This is a standard excuse because franchisees are legally independent businesses and bear their own responsibilities. The brands can easily shift the blame without facing any legal consequences. However, consumers buy products because of the brand's reputation, not the store owner. In the past two years, these brands have been implicated in issues such as excessive additives, food safety violations, and monopolistic practices, yet the blame has always been placed on individual employees. The truth is that brand evaluations focus on metrics like the number of stores opened and the amount of goods supplied, not on the accuracy of the scales. It's like schools that only assess enrollment numbers without checking exam discipline; when students cheat collectively, it's blamed on the students, not the school.
5. To Solve the Problem of Underweighing, We Need Systemic Changes
The brands' promise of tenfold refunds seems substantial, but in reality, it's not much more than the minimum legal requirement of returning the product and compensating three times the amount (500 yuan) under the Consumer Rights Protection Law. Raising compensation standards won't solve the problem, as it only benefits a few consumers who choose to fight for their rights. Effective solutions require strict rules that make cheating impossible, such as requiring real-time transmission of weighing data to the headquarters, allowing consumers to verify the weights directly, and using standard weights to calibrate scales every day. Increasing fines based on monthly sales would also deter cheating. Additionally, placing free fair scales at every store would eliminate the assumption that consumers are too lazy to check the weights.
The melamine scandal in the dairy industry required significant investments to establish a traceability system, but the snack industry can achieve the same results with much lower costs. By fixing these small issues, the potential profit from cheating would be outweighed by the risks and fines.