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 New Year 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 a Year” special, witnessing a reshaping of the New Year atmosphere.

As the Year of the Horse approaches, the New Year 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 are not very close, just giving a gift to show the intention is enough. Each household’s budget won’t exceed 100 yuan, but it should look decent, so no one can pick out any flaws,” says Li Na, who almost never overthinks gift-giving during the Spring Festival. “Spend less on less important face projects.”

Now, the younger generation is gradually becoming the main force in buying New Year goods. With a more pragmatic consumption outlook and a more relaxed attitude toward social interactions, they are redefining the New Year shopping market. 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 hurting the wallet has become an important pursuit for this year’s “New Year gift managers” in social exchanges.

New Year Gift Manager 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 or for giving to others, affordable and decent.” Many young people believe that New Year goods should first be useful, then focus on presentation. Of course, they also want well-known brands, sufficient quantity, and high cost-performance ratios.

Wang Xinyi, a post-90s from Jiangsu who recently got married, is serving as her family’s “New Year gift manager” for the first time this year. Her ideal gift box combines freshness and practicality, with a flexible budget—mostly a few hundred yuan. Due to visiting many relatives in her first year of marriage, she prefers items that can support the occasion and are budget-friendly, mainly shopping via e-commerce platforms.

A chance price comparison experience made Wang Xinyi enjoy the fun of careful budgeting. She found a set on Taobao that included “nut gift box + milk gift box + pastry gift box,” all from well-known brands. “With a budget of 100 yuan, I spent 300 yuan to get the effect.”

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

Screenshot from Xiaohongshu APP

Times Finance notes that as the Spring Festival approaches, many “Sam’s New Year gift guides under 100 yuan” and “Sam’s low-cost New Year 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 self-packaged with gift bands purchased from platforms like Pinduoduo, the entire set costs only 90 yuan.

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

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

An employee benefits manager from a certain 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 the popularity of Sam’s New Year gift guides, she “copied the trend” and ordered 30 gift sets, each 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 top four best-selling New Year gift boxes each sold over 200,000 units weekly, including the 59.8 yuan butter egg roll, 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 exceeded 100,000 units weekly.

In contrast, high-end New Year gift boxes averaging hundreds of yuan in price generally do not have outstanding sales.

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

Hema Fresh’s New Year gift box, Times Finance Photo

For example, Hema Fresh’s newly launched edible oil gift box contains two 1-liter bottles of olive oil, priced at 129 yuan, while similar products on other platforms sell single 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 strong sales. Times Finance learned that “Yonghui Custom” is a co-branded product series with well-known brands.

Yonghui Supermarket Egg Roll, Times Finance Photo

Additionally, Yonghui introduced a “Light Food Fish Maw Gift Box” priced at 199 yuan, which, through customized direct procurement, eliminated middlemen in traditional channels, reducing the price by nearly 100 yuan compared to previous years, and 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, Bai Ling from Shandong, who works in the city, sent her holiday gifts to her village before the holiday. She bought 25 items from Sam’s for five relatives, 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-enriched preserved eggs at 36.9 yuan.

“Buying liquor from other channels makes it easy to worry about counterfeit, and gift-giving becomes awkward. Sam’s is quite reliable. Plus, now everyone pays more attention to health, and many of Sam’s foods have clean ingredient lists,” 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 buying New Year gifts for more than ten relatives through Sam’s and e-commerce platforms. Besides regular cookies and pastries, she also purchased red wine, olive oil, and fish maw soup, hoping to let her hometown elders taste some of the trending “top products” from first-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 market. Meanwhile, regional retail giants are expanding their reach.

Pangdonglai, Times Finance Photo

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

Popular items include fruits, tea, white wine, cigars, and Pangdonglai’s custom gift boxes, many of which are in high demand during the New Year season. According to Times Finance, this year’s Pangdonglai gift boxes 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)” at 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, China Red gift boxes, purple women’s gift boxes, and children’s gift boxes. Additionally, products like iron stick yam, small-mill fragrant oil, Fangcheng braised noodles, and Hedong dried dates—Henan specialty gift boxes—often sell out quickly, with Pangdonglai’s self-branded beer and oat crisps also frequently out of stock upon restocking.

Young “New Year gift managers” creating presentable combinations under 100 yuan, Sam’s popular budget hits, and Pangdonglai’s booming orders are reshaping the traditional “the more expensive, the more face” logic of the Spring Festival market.