With a budget of 150 yuan, achieve results worth 500 yuan. Young people are rushing to buy Sam's Egg Rolls, and Fat Donglai's purchasing orders are flooding in.

Source: Times Finance Author: Chen Zexuan

Sam’s Club, Times Finance Photo

Editor’s Note: Carpooling home, group buying for New Year’s goods—this year, have you “pooled” for the Spring Festival? When Generation Z leads the Spring Festival, it doesn’t mean tradition disappears; instead, the flavor of the New Year shifts from solid to liquid, transforming from top-down inheritance to bottom-up creation. During the Year of the Horse Spring Festival, Times Finance launches the “Piling Up the New Year” special to witness a reshuffling of the festive atmosphere.

As the Year of the Horse Spring Festival approaches, the New Year’s goods market enters a peak purchasing period.

In Shandong, post-90s Li Na prepared gifts for visiting relatives early. She bought six boxes of milk, six boxes of yogurt, ten bags of rice, and four barrels of cooking oil on Pinduoduo, all from well-known brands.

“For some relatives who aren’t very close, just the gesture matters. Each household’s budget won’t exceed 100 yuan, but it should look decent, so no one can find fault,” said Li Na, who almost never overthinks gift-giving during the Spring Festival. “Spend less on less important face projects.”

Today, the younger generation is gradually becoming the main force in buying New Year’s goods. With a more pragmatic consumption outlook and a more relaxed attitude toward social interactions, they are redefining the market for New Year’s shopping. Recently, topics like “Budget under 50 yuan, how to give plastic relatives gifts,” “Budget 150 yuan, achieve a 500-yuan effect,” and “Under 100 yuan, send out a sense of luxury” have been trending on social platforms.

How to be presentable without breaking the bank has become an important pursuit for this generation of “New Year’s gift organizers” in social exchanges.

New Year’s Gift Organizer Buys Sam’s 59.9 Yuan Egg Rolls in Bulk

“I and people around me generally prefer practical, versatile gifts. Rice, flour, oil, milk—these are good for personal use and also suitable for giving to others, affordable and decent.” Many young people believe that New Year’s gifts should first be useful, then focus on presentation. Of course, they also want well-known brands, sufficient quantity, and high cost-performance ratios.

Recently married Jiangsu post-90s Wang Xinyi, who just became the “New Year’s gift organizer” for her family for the first time, envisions a gift box that combines freshness and practicality. Her gift budget is flexible, mostly “a few hundred yuan.” Due to visiting many relatives in her first year of marriage, she prefers items that can both impress and be budget-friendly, mainly shopping online.

A chance price comparison experience made Wang Xinyi realize the joy of frugal shopping. She found a set on Taobao that included “nut gift box + milk gift box + pastry gift box,” all from well-known brands. She spent 100 yuan but achieved a value of 300 yuan.

Consumers are becoming more rational, and offline supermarkets are also launching many tailored gifts. Walmart’s Wuji Xian, Hema’s SuperBox NB, Yonghui, Hema, RT-Mart, and even Sam’s Club, often labeled as “middle class,” have become popular choices for young people buying New Year’s goods.

Screenshot from Xiaohongshu APP

Times Finance notes that as the Spring Festival approaches, many “Sam’s Club New Year’s gift guides under 100 yuan” and “Sam’s low-cost New Year’s gift tutorials” have flooded social media. According to a blogger’s suggested pairing: “49.9 yuan waffle gift box + 35.9 yuan black truffle ham soda crackers,” then wrapping the gifts with self-purchased ribbons from platforms like Pinduoduo, the entire set costs only 90 yuan.

Many netizens think that combining Sam’s single items into gift boxes offers high cost-performance. For example, a 49.9 yuan chiffon cake plus an 48.9 yuan Luzhi River nut peach pastry, or a 49.8 yuan milk cookie plus a 59.9 yuan beef pastry for children; some adopt a “multi-platform group buy” approach—buying main products at Sam’s, supplementing with items from Taobao, and purchasing packaging materials from Pinduoduo to assemble suitable gifts for elders.

In recent years, Sam’s business in China has accelerated. Times Finance learned that many consumers have turned to Sam’s for shopping this year.

An employee benefits manager from a company told Times Finance that in previous years, the company’s New Year benefits were mostly local specialty products purchased offline, but after many years, they had almost “bought everything.” This year, with Sam’s New Year’s gift guide going viral, she “copied the idea,” ordering 30 gift sets at around 200 yuan per person. Due to high demand and frequent stockouts of some items, the orders were completed over several days in multiple transactions.

Sam’s App shows that this year’s Spring Festival bestsellers include four gift boxes, each with weekly sales exceeding 200,000 units: 59.8 yuan butter egg rolls, 99 yuan MM Daily Nuts, 42.8 yuan low-sugar egg yolk pastry, and 79.9 yuan MM pressed first-grade peanut oil. The fifth-ranked item, priced at 49.9 yuan—Meixin Life Cheese Egg Yolk Crisp—also sold over 100,000 units weekly.

In contrast, high-end New Year gift boxes priced in the hundreds or thousands of yuan generally have lower overall sales.

NielsenIQ reports that consumers’ core demands have shifted toward “spending less, buying more,” and “spending little, buying fun.”

Screenshot from Hema Fresh Spring Festival Goods

For example, Hema Fresh’s newly launched edible oil gift box contains two 1-liter bottles of olive oil, priced at 129 yuan. Many similar products on other platforms sell individual bottles for 80 to 100 yuan. Yonghui Supermarket’s “Yonghui Custom” butter egg roll, priced at 39.9 yuan, is also frequently sold out due to popularity. Times Finance learned that “Yonghui Custom” is a co-branded product series with well-known brands.

Yonghui Supermarket’s egg roll

Additionally, Yonghui introduced a “Light Food Fish Maw Gift Box” priced at 199 yuan, which, through customized direct procurement, eliminated middlemen, reducing the price by nearly 100 yuan compared to previous offerings. It also performed well in this year’s New Year market.

Pangdonglai’s Purchasing Orders Keep Coming

The demand for high-quality, cost-effective products is also spreading to lower-tier markets.

In Jiangxi, Wang Jing, a Shandong native working in the city, had not yet gone on holiday when her online orders of New Year’s gifts arrived in her village. She bought 25 items for five relatives at Sam’s, totaling nearly 2000 yuan, including grains, cookies, toys, chocolates, and white wine. The most expensive was Luzhou Laojiao Tequ liquor at 549.9 yuan; the cheapest was a box of selenium-rich preserved eggs at 36.9 yuan.

“Buying wine from other channels makes it easy to worry about counterfeit products, and gift-giving can be awkward. Sam’s is more reliable. Plus, now everyone cares more about health, and many of Sam’s foods have cleaner ingredients,” Wang Jing added. “For the same quality, Sam’s is a bit cheaper than other channels.”

This consumer logic is not unique. Wu Tingting from Zhejiang also spent nearly a thousand yuan, preparing New Year’s gifts for more than ten relatives using Sam’s and e-commerce platforms. Besides regular cookies and pastries, she also bought red wine, olive oil, and fish maw soup, hoping to let her hometown elders taste some of the “trendy goods” from first- and second-tier cities. She believes bringing high-quality city products back to rural areas is both decent and practical.

With a reputation for high cost-performance and brand influence, retail brands from high-tier cities are continuously impacting the lower-tier New Year’s market. Meanwhile, regional retail giants are expanding their reach.

Pangdonglai, Times Finance Photo

“Since the New Year’s season started, Pangdonglai’s purchasing orders have hardly slowed down,” said Pangdonglai’s purchasing agent Li Wen to Times Finance. Recently, clients placing orders with her come not only from various cities in Henan but also from Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Suzhou. “Most are buying for gifts.”

Popular items include fruits, tea, white wine, cigars, and Pangdonglai’s custom gift boxes, many of which see “explosive sales” during the holiday season. According to Times Finance, this year’s Spring Festival gift boxes from Pangdonglai include 29 categories, such as leisure food gift boxes, business gift boxes, women’s gift boxes, and Henan specialty food gift boxes, with a wide price range.

One example is a sky-blue children’s gift box priced at only 293 yuan, containing 12 snacks like cookies, pastries, candies, sunflower seeds, puffed foods, and jelly. The most expensive is the “Selected Business Gift Box (Free Love),” costing 21,300 yuan, including bird’s nest, tea, sea cucumber, black truffle, and ginseng slices.

Top-selling items include Henan specialty food gift boxes, Pangdonglai’s own product gift boxes, Chinese red gift boxes, purple women’s gift boxes, and children’s gift boxes. Additionally, Henan specialty gift boxes like iron stick yam, small磨香油, Fangcheng braised noodles, and “Hao Xiang Ni” red dates often sell out quickly. Pangdonglai’s self-operated beer and oatmeal crisps, which are perennial favorites, are also snapped up immediately upon restocking.

Young “New Year’s gift organizers” creating presentable gift sets under 100 yuan, popular Sam’s budget bestsellers, and Pangdonglai’s booming orders—this Spring Festival’s gift market has long moved beyond the traditional “the more expensive, the more face” logic.

(Names of interviewees Li Na, Wang Xinyi, Wang Jing, Wu Tingting, and Li Wen are pseudonyms.)