Aunt Money: Hong Kong's Insanely-Cheap Supermarket from China
Hong Kong’s limited green space for maturing animals and growing fresh green produce has made the city verifiably expensive for buying vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish.
Average grocery prices for an individual in Hong Kong rated seventh- highest in the world in 2021, just in front of Japan, Taiwan, and Luxembourg.
Western chains such as Market Place by Jasons, Marks & Spencer, Fusion, and City'Super cater to the city’s expat tastes, but render a large demographic of working-class Hong Kongers unable to afford fresh and tasty produce.
Unbeknownst to Hong Kong’s expats and locals with a taste for western foods, one Guangdong-born uber-cheap supermarket chain has cemented their status as the city's cheapest (and sometimes free) source for greens, fruit, fish, and meat.
錢大媽 (qián dà mā; Aunt Money) is a mainland Chinese supermarket chain headquartered in Guangzhou City in Guangdong. As of September 2021, they currently operate over 3,000 stores in mainland China and Hong Kong under the premise of selling the cheapest meat cuts, ground vegetables, and fruit, as compared to any other competitor.
The chain opened their first store selling fresh pork products in April 2012 in a residential district of Dongguan, Guangdong.
On August 25, 2018, 錢大媽 (Aunt Money) opened their first store in Hong Kong, becoming the 11th city where the mainland supermarket chain had started operations at the time.
Stores (37 in total as of September 2021) are located in Hong Kong Island’s and Kowloon’s side streets in working class residential areas and New Territories’ populated new towns. Their store fronts are bright red and adorned with the company's title in thick white traditional text – you can’t miss it from a mile away.
The chain’s two successes lay in its cheap prices and discount model. Stock is imported daily from farms in Guangzhou and priced cheap. In their Sheung Wan location on a Monday morning, we found four green peppers for HK$6.10, half a head of wax gourd for HK$7.28, a four-kilogram chicken for HK$35, and sticks of carrots, eggplants, and cucumbers priced HK$5 and up.
The chain’s superpower is their discount model. Most stores open at 8 AM to customers and close at 11:30 PM. To stay true to their slogan of 不卖隔夜肉 ( bù mài géyè ròu) - not selling overnight meat – Aunt Money begins half-hour discounts from 7 PM.
Every 30 minutes passing results in 10% knocked off every single item still remaining in the store. By 8 PM, every item is 20% off, 9:30 PM is 60%, 11:00 PM a whopping 90% off, and by 11:30 PM remaining stock is given away to customers for free.
For every new store opening in the city, usually occurring on average once a month in Hong Kong, up to 1,000 free vegetables are given away to customers passing by the store.
Three days prior to an official opening, from 9 AM to 4:30 PM, crowds form and lines trail the side of the street in anticipation of free giveaways of broccoli, bok choi, tomatoes, sweet corn, carrots, potatoes, and onions.
Images seen on social media and posted on the company’s social media platforms show lines upwards of 100 domestic helpers, elderly, morning office workers, and housewives waiting patiently for small plastic bags of a vegetable medley, for free.
Google searches of the chain in China return images of fist fights of early-morning risers eager to beat others to get their fresh fruit first and insanely long lines of trolleys and elderly in Hong Kong waiting to get their pork for the weekend.
The chain’s most recent opening of a store in Yau Mai Tei on Reclamation Street celebrated with a three-day free-giveaway period from Sep. 16- to 18, before their official opening on Sep. 19.
Even on opening day, each store releases often crazy discounts for the opening week to turn lined-up-customers into addicts. The store on Reclamation Street, for example, sold small potatoes for HK$1, 20 eggs for HK$16.5 a box, a small chicken for HK$28, and yellow croaker fishes for HK$20.
The company states on their website, their physical stores in Hong Kong, on signs adorning the front entrance, and the words exiting store manager mouths that “[Aunt Qian] insist on making every meal fresh.”
Aunt Qian is a risky business – selling insanely cheap produce with rents sky high in Hong Kong. The Chinese firm finished their series D round of funding in December 2019, seeking opportunities for expansion after opening their first stores in Central and Eastern China – a sign that Aunt Qian are seeking to go public on the Chinese market or they failed to raise enough capital to buoy the new openings of 100s of stores.
As noted by a Hong Kong paper, due to the company's business model of an added 10% discount for every 30 minutes past 7 PM, with free produce given away at 11 PM, customers have habitually arrived later and later in the night to make use of the discounted items.
A mainland Chinese business TV channel reported in September 2021 that even as new stores open weekly in the Greater China region, franchises were closely stores in great numbers in mainland China.
It remains to be seen if Aunt Qian’s model in South China can be replicated in the most expensive city in the world, where a hunger for cheap prices grows year-by-year.
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