The demand for pet foster home feeding in the Spring Festival is booming, and the consumption in the Spring Festival highlights the new upsurge of ＂other economy＂
On the morning of February 12, Miao Miao, a pet caretaker who lives in the University Town, opened the client’s door and was surrounded by three cats. The cat bowl was empty and the ground was covered with cat litter. She rolled up her sleeves, changed food, added water, shoveled excrement, cleaned the room and made videos … In less than half an hour, she finished this single "door-to-door feeding".
This Spring Festival, Vivi is fully booked every day, and it is estimated that he can earn about 10,000 yuan in eight days. The reporter visited and found that during the Spring Festival, the demand for pet foster care and door-to-door feeding was particularly strong, and pet consumption items such as buying new clothes, preparing big meals, and beauty bathing also ushered in a peak.
The Spring Festival activates a new scene of pet consumption, and pet custodians earn 10,000 yuan in 8 days.
Vivi, 28, usually works as a graphic designer. She likes to keep cats since she was a child. At first, she was entrusted by her friends to take care of cats on holidays. Later, she began to post orders in Xiaohongshu and friends circle. "There is no threshold for this job, as long as she likes pets and is willing to run, many of them are repeat customers."
Add grain, change water, wash dishes, shovel excrement, play with others, comb hair, and shoot videos for the owner. This is the basic service content of Vivi’s door-to-door pet feeding, and the service is generally charged per time. During the Spring Festival, Vivi rode an electric car and ran about 20 times a day. The price of home feeding a pet cat within 2km is once in 50 yuan, once in 60 yuan within 5km and once in 80 yuan within 8km. Orders beyond 8km are basically not accepted. If there are multiple pets or other needs, you need to pay more.
"However, I will also communicate with customers before taking the order, such as whether the pet has been vaccinated and whether there is a camera at home, otherwise it is easy to cause disputes if valuables are lost." Vivi said.
The reporter interviewed a number of pet owners. Most of them said that they would be worried about the safety of their pets or their homes after strangers came to their homes. However, some pet owners once bought home-feeding services, and then invited people to their homes every time they went out.
In addition to personal pet care providers, many third-party platforms have sprung up. These platforms provide real-name registration, pet care experience certification, business assessment, etc. Some platforms also require pet care providers to pay a deposit, and the service pricing is more expensive than personal pet care providers.
In addition to door-to-door feeding, the foster care business of pet shops is also "hard to find a room". Mickey, the owner of a pet shop in Tianjie, U City, a university town, said that the foster care business was particularly good this year, and 40 pet rooms were booked up long ago. One day in a small room in 58 yuan, one day in a big room in 68 yuan, and pets should bring their own rations.
Several pet shops near Wang Yan’s home in Nan ‘an are fully booked, so they can only be sent to a store 5 kilometers away for foster care, and two cats live in a "deluxe room", 150 yuan/day.
"It will cost 1,200 yuan in 8 days, catching up with the living expenses for two or three months." Wang Yan said.
Mickey said that the price of 150 yuan/Day is not high, and the content of foster care service is not complicated, but there are obvious off-peak seasons, and there is basically no business except for the Spring Festival and National Day holiday.
During the Spring Festival, some people choose to foster care, and some people choose to bring their pets home and travel together. These different scenes also stimulate the corresponding demand. On the JD.COM platform, the search for pet travel equipment and cat bags has increased greatly; The popularity of intelligent products such as automatic feeders and cat litter pots has increased rapidly. For example, the browsing and transaction of Xiao Pei’s intelligent automatic feeders have doubled from the previous month, and the browsing of pet New Year’s clothing has exceeded 5 times and the transaction has exceeded 3 times.
The subdivision track is becoming more and more "rolled up", and pets should also have a "sense of ceremony" during the New Year.
"From the pet consumption trend of the Spring Festival, we can see that with the release of consumption vitality, the pet economic track is becoming more and more refined and more and more rolled up." Li Ran, director of the Department of Applied Economics in chongqing technology and business university, said that the pet industry is developing in the direction of high quality, digitalization and segmentation.
For example, some time ago, when the cold wave struck and the temperature plummeted, the sales volume of pet electric blankets in Chongqing increased by 100% compared with last year, and the pet blankets increased by 997%. It can be delivered to home in "the fastest 30 minutes" for instant retail, which has become the choice for many consumers to place emergency orders for cold-proof goods.
In terms of daily pet services, pet grooming, pet foster care, pet photography and other services have continued to grow, and pet medical care has grown rapidly. According to the data of Meituan, since 2023, the search volume of the keyword "pet bathing beauty" has increased by 180% year-on-year, and the demand for "24-hour pet doctor" has soared, with the search volume increasing by 150% year-on-year.
For pet services, "nearby" physical stores are still the home of business. A survey data of Meituan confirmed this trend: being close to home is the most important factor in pet owners’ decision-making of medical treatment and consumption, accounting for 57.9%.
Pets’ New Year gifts have also entered the new year’s list of many consumers. On the JD.COM platform, since January, the search for pet gift boxes, gift packages and other related products has exceeded 30% month-on-month, and the sales volume has soared.
In addition to snack gift packages, pets’ New Year’s gifts are even more "rolled". In addition to matching the gift boxes with scarves, hats and blessing bracelets, many brands have launched special New Year’s gifts-freeze-dried Dafu cakes larger than their faces, firecrackers barrels for cats, freeze-dried mahjong tiles and interactive snacks, which will fill up the atmosphere and sense of ceremony of the New Year.
There are more than 20,000 pet-related enterprises in Chongqing, and they will grow substantially in the future.
From the perspective of pet consumers, young people under the age of 40 account for over 70% of online pet owners in supermarkets in JD.COM, and nearly 70% in first-and second-tier cities, and the pet owners continue to grow at a high speed, showing a trend of urbanization and youthfulness. Among them, the generation Z aged 25 and below is growing rapidly, and the penetration rate of unmarried people is increasing. Pet consumption has provided huge business opportunities for the industry. At present, the pet economy in Chongqing is developing well, and more pet-related enterprises and service organizations have emerged.
The reporter saw that there are at least 10 pet shops and 8 pet hospitals within 3 kilometers of a community in the university town. Looking at the whole of Chongqing, as of February 1st, there were nearly 3,000 pet shops in Chongqing on Meituan platform, among which the order volume of pet shops increased by 150% year-on-year. Enterprise survey data show that there are 20,700 existing pet-related enterprises in Chongqing. In the past 10 years, the number of registered pet-related enterprises in Chongqing showed a continuous positive growth trend. From 2021 to 2023, the number of pet-related enterprises increased by 3,602, 4,459 and 7,647 respectively, up by 22.85%, 23.79% and 71.50% year-on-year.
According to Li Ran’s analysis, globally, the number of pets per capita is positively correlated with GDP. Not long ago, Chongqing’s GDP stood at 3 trillion steps, which means that the pet economy has great room for growth. However, with the development of the times, the pet industry is constantly changing, with transformation and upgrading. With the increasing number of pets, the demand for basic pet services is increasing, such as pet grooming, pet hospitals, pet parks and so on. With the development of science and technology, emerging fields such as pet health, pet insurance and pet smart products will become the important development direction of the pet industry in the future.
Li Ran said that the work report of Chongqing municipal government put forward "stimulating potential consumption", and the pet economy is an integral part of new consumption, so Chongqing can actively seize this market cake. He suggested the following measures: First, increase policy support and encourage relevant enterprises to innovate and expand the market; The second is to strengthen industry supervision and improve the quality and safety of pet services; Third, the development of pet economy should be combined with urban culture, tourism and other industries to form a diversified development pattern. Through the implementation of these measures, Chongqing can better develop pet economy, increase consumption supply, stimulate consumption vitality and promote sustainable economic development.