Saturday night at The Distillery, a small bar tucked away in a warren of narrow lanes in Beijing’s city centre. The place is almost empty – a few people sit at the bar sipping cocktails and moaning about pollution. “It’s a bad smog day so people aren’t coming out,” says Bill Isler, the American bar owner, buffing glasses through boredom. Conversations in the bar revolve around the smog and the near-constant cloud it causes across the Chinese capital.
Stepping out of the bar, the smoky tang of polluted air instantly hits the back of the throat while visually, the haze creates an apocalyptic vibe. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection’s (MEP) air quality index (AQI), the official measure of harmful pollutants in their air, has averaged over 400 micrograms per cubic metre for most of the day. China has weaker severity classifications for air pollution, but according to the World Health Organisation a measurement over 300 indicates a “severely polluted”atmosphere in which the public is advised to not go outside. The WHO puts the safe level at 25.
The city is currently experiencing its worst spell of air pollution of 2015. The environmental and health impacts to China of these high levels of air pollution are well documented, but it has direct impacts on businesses in the country too.
In 2013 the MEP issued guidelines for businesses about how to tackle pollution, including suggestions that workers could take annual leave for smog days or work from home, but the measures were not mandatory. While there are legal limits for work environment factors such as temperature, companies are protected from loss of productivity due to smog by this lack of recognition. Some foreign companies such as Japanese electronics giant Panasonic, meanwhile, offer a ‘“pollution allowance”’ to foreign workers they base in Beijing to tempt them to stay there.
The tourism industry is particularly vulnerable, with many believing that news reports about smog-cloaked Chinese cities have contributed to the recent downturn in international tourists visiting the country.
“The branding of China is all around the Great Wall and Forbidden City near and inside Beijing, which is now covered in smog,” says Roy Graff, managing director of tourism advisory firm China Contact. “International tourists see that and attribute it to all of China, even though in the west of the country the air is pretty good.”
As such, hotels in polluted cities are increasingly marketing themselves towards domestic tourists and international business travellers, who visit China regardless of pollution levels. Tour companies are acting too. “No tour operator would admit it on record, but I’ve found that many that have focused on China are now selling more trips to south-east Asia to offset the downturn,” says Graff. “They’re diversifying to keep turnover up.”
The food and beverage industry is also affected. The marketing team of Mosto, a western-style restaurant in Beijing’s busy Sanlitun shopping area, estimates it has a 30% decrease in walk-in business when the AQI is high. Nearby craft beer bar Jing A, a large venue usually packed with ale-swigging customers, saw trade drop by around 30% in early November during a week of particularly bad smog.
However, when pollution peaks and people stay indoors to avoid it, some food delivery services enjoy sales spikes.
Dao Jia, a meal delivery company that employs around 3,000 people across 10 Chinese cities, sees business increase by around 15% when the AQI is high. It’s a particularly busy time for them now in Beijing. “In winter here, the public heating system that uses a lot of coal kicks in, so air pollution is heavier compared to the summer,” says Sun Hao, CEO of the company. “It really helps us with order volume.”
Sherpa’s, a smaller meal delivery firm that operates in Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, reports a sales spike of up to 30% on high pollution days in the capital. Founder Mark Secchia says that the industry has a history of profiting from depressing trends. “In terms of tragedies ironically helping business, one of the main things that really helped Sherpa’s was the SARS outbreak in 2002,” he says. “We quadrupled sales because people didn’t want to leave their houses.”
Other food businesses in China are also finding silver linings in having to operate in a smog cloud. Carrefour, the French supermarket chain, recently ran adverts in the Beijing media trumpeting its first green store in the city, featuring an air cleaning system and electric car charging stations. Staff at Moka Bros, a health-orientated sister restaurant to Mosto, claim it enjoys decent sales during smog days as customers crave healthy food and share photos of their meals on WeChat, China’s hugely popular messaging app.
Some actively use pollution as a marketing springboard. Isler, The Distillery bar owner, has air purifiers in his two bars that reduce AQI indoors to around a third of outside levels. When the smog intensifies he sends a message to his bar’s WeChat contacts: “Kill your liver, not your lungs, breathe clean air while you drink.”
Juice By Melissa, an organic juice company, sells “signature pollution fighting juices” at a discount when the AQI is over 200. Jing A, meanwhile, serves a suitably bitter “Airpocalypse” beer that gets cheaper on a sliding scale as the AQI increases. “We have eight air purifiers pumping and close all the doors,” says co-founder Kris Li. “It’s not enough to offset the loss smog causes but people do come looking for it. They show us their phones with AQI apps, asking for discounts.”
Living in a city as polluted as Beijing can grind. But it seems that increasingly small businesses – and the capital’s bargain-hunting boozers – are making the best of it.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion