At around six o’clock in the evening, Tao Duoduo from Shanghai’s Minhang District was walking home from get off work.
While waiting for the red light, she took out her mobile phone and checked the status of the puppy through the camera at home – “The little guy is already spinning in circles at the door.” When she walked to the door of the house, the express delivery was piled on the floor. She no longer needed to hurriedly turn over the keys. She brushed her face towards the door lock, and with a “click” sound, the door opened.
In the kitchen, the integrated cooking center has steamed corn and custard in advance; after dinner, the dishwasher is washing the dishes in the kitchen, the washing machine is washing clothes on the balcony, and the sweeping robot is sweeping the floor in front of you.
This is the daily life of an ordinary Chinese family under the lens of the media.
But even such an ordinary life scene hides the secret of profound changes in China’s consumption structure.
When Tao Duoduo and her husband renovated their new house, they only looked at one standard for all home appliances – “smart, if you can free your hands, you can free your hands!” In the past, when people bought appliances, they looked for “durability”; now, they ask “whether they are smart enough.”
The focus of consumption is changing from “have something” to “is it good or not”.
What deserves more attention is where the time saved by the smart home went – Tao Duoduo used the time to start a side job and go to the gym regularly to exercise.
Customized travel tours, monthly gym subscriptions, video memberships, music memberships, audiobook memberships… “The proportion of service consumption in this small family is getting higher and higher.”
From “buying goods” to “buying services”, from “owning physical objects” to “buying experiences”, the consumption ledger of Tao Duoduo’s family is a microscopic footnote to the transformation of China’s consumption structure.
From 2013 to 2024, the proportion of national per capita service consumption expenditure in the per capita consumption expenditure of residents increased from 39.7% to 46.1%.
In 2025, my country’s annual service retail sales will increase by 5.5% over the previous year, 1.7 percentage points higher than the growth rate of commodity retail sales; residents’ per capita service consumption expenditure will reach 14,000 yuan.
In first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, service consumption accounts for close to or even more than 60%, which means that for every 10 yuan that citizens spend, more than 6 yuan is spent on “experiences” rather than “physical objects.”
Behind these figures is a profound transformation from “commodity dominance” to “equal emphasis on commodities and services”.
Consumption is shifting from “just needing to cover the bottom line” to “improving quality to please oneself”, and from “transaction-driven” to “experience-driven”.
People are increasingly willing to pay for health, knowledge, emotional value and personalized experiences.
In the cultural and tourism market, immersive tourism has become the mainstream, and in-depth experiential consumption has grown significantly; in the national trend of consumption, young people’s shopping carts are filled with “cultural confidence”; in the field of smart homes, technology is evolving from “tool attributes” to “service attributes”.
Each vivid new consumption scene reflects the surging vitality of the consumer market.
The iterative upgrade of the consumption structure is by no means a simple shift in consumption preferences, but the comprehensive result of high-quality economic development, continuous improvement of people’s livelihood and well-being, and continuous innovation of social concepts.
Steady economic growth has laid a solid foundation for consumption upgrading, and residents’ incomes have continued to rise, freeing the public from the constraints of consumption for food and clothing, and leaving them free to pursue quality life, spiritual enrichment and self-improvement.
Technological innovation empowers continuous innovation in consumption scenarios. Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data are deeply integrated into daily life, allowing new types of consumption such as smart homes, online services, and customized experiences to take root, providing solid technical support for service consumption and experience consumption.
At the same time, the people’s livelihood security system continues to improve, and policies such as social security, medical care, and employment support continue to be implemented, eliminating residents’ worries about consumption and completely activating the endogenous driving force for consumption upgrades.
The changes in small household scenes reflect the rise in consumption in large countries; the innovations in people’s livelihood consumption bring together the majestic power of economic development.
From “basic life” to “refined life”, from “rigorous physical needs” to “experience that pleases oneself”, the changes in China’s consumption structure are a vivid epitome of the progress of the times and a strong proof of high-quality development.
