We all remember Haidilao as the steamboat restaurant that we go to for free classic manicure while waiting, free fairy stick if we say an embarrassing phrase and more freebies during your birthday.
But little did you know all these freebies may disappear sooner rather than later for they are closing 300 outlets by the end of this year.
HaiDiLao Closing 300 Outlets by the End of 2021 After Opening Over 1 Restaurant Per Day
An announcement was made on Friday on Haidilao’s social media post, saying the company will shut down about 300 outlets. The closure will affect the outlets with low revenue and traffic.
Although the selected stores will shut down before 31 Dec of this year, the company said that they will not lay off its staff for now. Instead, they will reassign these staff to work within the company. The company have a total of about 131,084 employees.
Some of these stores will potentially reopen after reorganisation.
Haidilao has added about 544 new restaurants in 2020.
That’s an average of about 1.5 new restaurants per day.
As of 30 June, Haidilao had 1,597 restaurants globally.
Thanks to COVID-19, Haidilao’s business have been falling with an average rate sinking to three times per day for the first half of 2021 and 4.8 times per day in 2019.
This lead to losses for the company’s net profit and growth rate.
This may be because the consumption of hotpot is a social thing and people normally do that with family and friends. However, thanks to the pandemic being social as well, the number of people eating hotpot has reduced.
Plus, people are less likely to order hotpot at home.
The sad news has attracted over 620 million views on Weibo. Many of the netizens seemed to agree with their outlets’ closure, asking them to focus more on their services instead of the outlets’ quantity.
A netizen wrote on Weibo, “The more stores you open, the less you focus on service, the surroundings of the newly opened stores are not up to par, while prices are only rising.”
Haidilao Singapore
No announcements of such were made on Singapore’s Haidilao Facebook page. In fact, the outlets in Singapore seemed to be more concerned about other things.
According to some of the patrons of Haidilao Singapore, the restaurant chain has even jumped on the squid game trend and offered the honeycomb candy challenge to customers as well. This challenge is currently only available to patrons in the Clarke Quay branch.
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Featured Image: Sarunyu L/ shutterstock.com