Image Credit: Visual China

By DeepDigest (Dongdong Notes)

This sharing-economy venture claimed to enable "earn while you lie down", and every entrepreneur who jumped in hoped to achieve a "lying victory". After the boom-and-bust of bike-sharing, and the quiet fade of shared umbrellas, shared strollers, and shared wardrobes, what lies ahead for shared massage chairs that once populated shopping malls, hotels, stations, and airports?

"I want to sell this project as a package as soon as possible — even at a cheap price, as long as someone takes it." At a large shopping mall in Meilin, Shenzhen, two technicians were repairing a row of shared massage chairs. Li Hao, the owner of these chairs, stood aside with a helpless look.

He told DeepDigest that at the end of 2016, at a friend's strong invitation, he joined a shared massage chair franchise and became part of the sharing startup wave. Yet after two years, not only did these chairs fail to bring him substantial profits, but they also kept demanding more and more money for repairs.

"These few chairs were just repaired the day before yesterday. The longer the equipment age, the higher the repair frequency." When asked whether poor product quality was the reason for the high repair rate, Li Hao shook his head.

"They were all broken by people using them for free. Many of our franchisees and peers face the same problem — it's such a headache!"

Who exactly broke his shared massage chairs?

The Vicious Cycle of Repairs — Too Hard to "Lie and Win"

"All chairs were purchased directly from the brand’s factory, and we have always taken good care of them."

Recalling the time two years ago when the first batch of shared massage chairs was placed in shopping malls, Li Hao felt deeply emotional. He told DeepDigest that apart from the franchise fee, he invested more than 100,000 yuan to buy nearly twenty shared massage chairs, and later ordered another thirty units of the same model.

These fifty chairs, distributed across several major business districts in Shenzhen, carried his deep dream of getting rich. However, starting from the third month of operation, he fell into a vicious circle of chair damage, repair, and re-damage.

"It’s hard to imagine — within just two months, some shared massage chairs were already terribly worn." Li Hao said helplessly. Some had artificial leather peeling off, some had drinks seeping into the interior, some had switches or components damaged, and some had the footrest brackets broken by being stepped on.

"It’s all man-made disasters. No matter how strong the brand, it can’t withstand such abuse!"

What also caused Li Hao heartache was the high cost of repair and maintenance. He calculated: assuming each shared massage chair generated an average daily income of 100 yuan, 50 units could bring in about 5,000 yuan per day. But the daily repair and maintenance expenses for those fifty chairs also amounted to nearly 3,000 yuan.

"That’s no exaggeration — one piece of artificial leather costs 500 yuan, switches and electronic components cost 100–300 yuan. If the bracket breaks, it must be sent back to the factory." After one year, the hourly rates of repair technicians kept rising, and the growing maintenance costs gradually became unbearable for Li Hao.

After deducting maintenance costs and employee wages, plus rent paid to shopping malls, hotels and other property owners (often tens of thousands of yuan per month), his business basically broke even in the first year. By early 2018, the frequency of chair damage had increased, and the number of factory overhauls had grown.

"Many peers thought it was the manufacturer’s problem, but I believe it’s a matter of people’s behavior." In order to see who was damaging his shared massage chairs, Li Hao frequently patrolled the shopping malls and hotels where his chairs were placed to observe usage.

He was astonished to find that almost every shared massage chair had become a place for passersby to put their belongings or take a temporary rest. Some shoppers would sit on them for one or two hours without scanning the QR code or paying for a massage. Some parents would put their children on the chairs to rest or use them as trampolines. Others would pick at the leather on the seats, even if it had just begun to crack.

"Especially after dinner, many parents take their kids for a walk. When the children get tired, the parents let them play or eat snacks on the chairs." Li Hao said that when several children of six or seven jump on the same massage chair, the bracket will eventually break — and accidents could easily happen.

Since Li Hao adopted a patrol system without on-site fixed staff, the chairs were mostly unattended. When patrol employees did see such situations, they would try to dissuade the users and explain the rules. However, sometimes children (or their parents) and elderly people were difficult to communicate with, and arguments would even break out.

Worse still, once shared massage chairs placed in hotels or shopping malls were occupied for free, few paying customers would come. As idle occupancy increased, the daily revenue dropped, while repair costs kept rising.

"Sometimes the entire row of massage chairs was filled with non-paying users. Unless I stayed on-site permanently and politely explained things — which is nearly impossible." The free occupation and damage of shared massage chairs turned the brand’s promises of "payback in three months" and "easy daily income of 10,000 yuan" into theoretical values. For Li Hao and some of his peers, the hope of getting rich through the sharing wave became distant.

If you observe carefully, you’ll see that shared projects suffering like this are not limited to massage chairs.

Shared Facilities Become "Use-and-Abandon" Tools for Users

"How can you carry such heavy things on a shared bike?"

Out of empathy, Li Hao once tried to stop a passerby in Gangxia Village who was loading heavy construction equipment onto a shared bike. But the man not only ignored him, but also called him a busybody and hurled insults at his family.

He told DeepDigest that a shared bike can probably bear the weight of one adult. However, the equipment the man placed on the bike must have weighed more than 150 kilograms — he couldn’t even ride it, only push it slowly.

Such scenes are just one snapshot among millions of shared bikes. For Wu Yingjie, who runs a shared KTV business, a broken bike doesn’t cost much, but when her shared KTV equipment gets damaged, the repairs are truly painful.

But like shared massage chairs, shared KTVs in many large shopping malls and public spaces are often treated by passersby as places to rest, eat, or chat.

"Rest is fine, but at least don’t destroy the equipment." She said helplessly that her company sends staff to inspect the equipment in malls every week, and each time they find damage, missing parts, and stains from drinks or food. Some tabletops and glass doors were even graffitied or scratched.

Wu Yingjie found that no matter how durable the replacement parts, some people who came just to "rest" would still disassemble or damage them. Even using stronger glass for the display screens and metal mesh for the microphones couldn’t prevent the damage. The persistently high repair and replacement costs over the past six months have given her a constant headache.

"We checked the surveillance footage, but even if we know the faces, there’s little we can do to identify or punish them." Calling the police rarely produced results. In frustration, her team came up with a desperate measure — posting photos of people who damaged the KTV equipment, hoping it would serve as a deterrent.

In contrast, Han Yong, who founded a local time-share car rental platform in Guangdong, has had an even worse experience. At the beginning, his platform purchased the same model of mid-to-low-end vehicles from a joint-venture brand (around 80,000 yuan each), precisely because he worried that users would drive them ruthlessly and ruin the cars.

But after the new vehicles were put into the market in early 2017, after less than a year of user abuse, these cars could not even be sold for 10,000 yuan in the second-hand market.

"New drivers who have just gotten their licenses use shared cars to practice — driving on any road, it’s ridiculous." He told DeepDigest that some brand-new vehicles would have their bumpers damaged just days after being put on the road. Broken wipers, scratched mirrors, and tires cut by sharp objects were all too common.

Due to lax management and the large number of users during promotions, it was very difficult for the platform to determine which specific user caused the damage. If they charged all users collectively, they feared causing dissatisfaction and harming the brand’s newly built reputation.

"It’s really like being caught between a rock and a hard place. Several times I’ve seen our shared cars parked randomly at the roadside in the Free Trade Zone, with damaged front bumpers and lights — I just wanted to stand there and curse." So far, the platform has completed two rounds of financing, and most of the funds have gone into repairing and replacing vehicles. Parts procurement and maintenance costs have become the largest operational expense.

Man-made occupation or damage, along with endless maintenance and repair, drains the finances of many sharing projects, becoming the biggest headache for entrepreneurs. No matter how high the product quality, it cannot withstand such abuse. However, it would be biased to blame everything on poor public manners. Some industry insiders emphasize that these sharing projects should have established clear behavioral norms and enforcement mechanisms from the very beginning.

Is this suggestion reliable?

High Costs, Users Treat Occupying and Damaging as Natural

"At first, I thought passersby mistook the shared massage chairs for public rest areas."

To make sure that customers in shopping malls clearly understood that the shared massage chairs required scanning and payment to use — and were not free public seating — Li Hao prepared signs to place next to each chair, stating: "Scan to pay, no loitering."

Yet even the warnings from patrol staff and their repeated explanations ultimately had no effect. In other words, some passersby were not "misunderstanding" the purpose, but deliberately occupying the chairs.

"What’s most frustrating is that someone took photos of our ‘No Sitting Without Payment’ signs and posted them on Weibo, accusing sharing entrepreneurs of ignoring the physical needs of the elderly and children, occupying public space that could otherwise be used for public rest areas." To prevent the incident from escalating further and harming the brand’s reputation, Li Hao had to remove those signs.

Some peers suggested that hiring dedicated personnel to manage the shared massage chairs at each location would effectively stop free riders and prevent intentional damage. But in his view, his fifty chairs were located in nearly ten different shopping malls and hotels across Futian and Nanshan districts in Shenzhen. Hiring more than a dozen employees would be an enormous extra cost, making the business financially unviable.

"Even if we install cameras on every vehicle, it doesn’t really help much." Han Yong also told DeepDigest that in an effort to regulate user behavior, his team installed dashcams in their shared cars. But the dashcams themselves were often the first thing to be damaged.

At first, the memory cards were stolen or destroyed. After switching to cloud storage, the camera lenses were often blocked or smeared. Some users even complained to the platform that installing dashcams violated their privacy.

"As for shared bikes everywhere on the streets, it’s even more impossible to manage." A friend once told Han Yong at a dinner: "Sharing startups are just about raising money, right? You’re burning the venture capitalists’ money anyway, why be so concerned?"

Han Yong told DeepDigest that the sharing economy is indeed a product of hype. Whether each project has real market demand and value needs to be tested by time. But regardless of a project's success or failure, it should not justify wanton damage and abuse by some users or passersby.

Over the past year, the sharing economy has seen a wave of retreats. The lucky ones achieved scale through land grabbing and were acquired by giants; the unlucky either perished directly or struggled on all fronts. While everyone questions user conscience and national character, we should also ask: are all these overwhelming sharing projects truly reasonable and valuable?

Or, in the midst of this all-encompassing sharing frenzy, who is truly the innocent party?