Economic Daily article: There are no winners in the involution competition; the takeout war should come to an end.

(Source: Blue Whale News)

On March 25, the Economic Daily published a commentary article titled “The Takeout Delivery Wars Should End.” The article says that the takeout delivery wars affect not only the ledgers of catering and restaurant business owners, but also people’s livelihoods. When dining and catering consumption—which serves as a “stabilizer”—loses momentum because of price wars, the chill felt by the overall economy will ultimately spread to every individual at the micro level. Healthy competition should be a positive contest of technological innovation, efficiency gains, and service optimization.

Healthy competition should be a positive contest of technological innovation, efficiency gains, and service optimization, rather than a money-burning game propped up by capital, and not a zero-sum game that uses a monopolistic position to control traffic and force people to take sides. Bring takeout prices back to a reasonable range, help the catering industry escape the dilemma of “it’s dead without subsidies, and it gets chaotic with subsidies,” and shift market competition from “competing by burning cash” to “competing by service”—this is what truly benefits businesses and helps the public. The price war can’t go far; in a competition of over-internalization, there are no winners. The takeout delivery wars should end.

The full text is as follows:

The takeout delivery wars affect not only the ledgers of catering and restaurant business owners, but also people’s livelihoods. When dining and catering consumption—which serves as a “stabilizer”—loses momentum because of price wars, the chill felt by the overall economy will ultimately spread to every individual at the micro level. Healthy competition should be a positive contest of technological innovation, efficiency gains, and service optimization.

In the past few days, have you still received freebie vouchers from a takeout delivery platform? At a news briefing held recently, the State Administration for Market Regulation disclosed the latest progress in its antimonopoly investigation into takeout delivery platforms, saying that regulatory authorities have moved in to conduct on-site inspections of relevant platforms. Next, they will further transmit regulatory pressure through methods such as questionnaires and verification, and will study and formulate enforcement and handling measures. This is sending a clear message to the market: the frantic takeout delivery wars must be shut down!

The takeout delivery wars seem beneficial to consumers, but in reality they drive internalization.

For consumers, the takeout delivery wars are indeed “appealing”—who doesn’t like 1-yuan milk tea and 3-yuan coffee? However, what is free is often the most expensive. When we shift our focus from the freebie vouchers in our phones to the overall economic picture, we find that the cost of this battle is ultimately being borne by ordinary people like us—and far beyond expectations.

The most direct impact shows up in macroeconomic data. From the end of Q2 to Q3 2025, the CPI—reflecting consumer prices of Chinese residents—has continued to fall, and the consumption market has felt chills. But strangely, if you strip out food and energy, core CPI has been rising instead. This indicates that consumption was supposed to warm up, but was being yanked down by something rigid.

What’s yanking it is catering and dining.

In China’s CPI statistical basket, the weight of food, tobacco and alcohol, as well as meals eaten out, is close to 30%, the highest among all categories. This means that when catering and dining prices rise, the CPI may jump accordingly; when catering and dining prices fall, the CPI may slump accordingly.

With this background in mind, you can see that from the end of Q2 to Q3 2025, China’s catering revenue growth rate slowed down, and the timing and trajectory of its decline closely overlap with the downward curve of overall CPI. Meanwhile, in the same period, residential and transportation communications—also with relatively high weights—did not show a similar decline.

And this period is precisely when the takeout delivery wars were at their hottest and when platform subsidies were at their most frantic. According to financial reports, during the takeout delivery wars, Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan cumulatively provided subsidies of as much as 80 billion to 100 billion yuan. The China Cuisine Association pointed out that the price decline caused by platforms’ large-scale subsidy practices has been an important factor constraining the growth rate of the catering industry since June 2025. Observations from Meituan indicate that this battle directly pushed the average spend per dine-in customer back to a level from 10 years ago.

On the surface, the takeout delivery wars are platforms “sharing the benefits” with consumers. But from a macro perspective, this is a violent shock to the catering industry’s pricing system. Catering enterprises, to survive the subsidy war, have no choice but to sacrifice quality and compress profits. The entire industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of losing money and trying to buy attention. Ultimately, this drags down the broader trend of consumption recovering—which runs directly against the central government’s work arrangements to boost consumption, adding unnecessary resistance to macroeconomic regulation.

The takeout delivery wars affect not only the ledgers of catering and restaurant business owners, but also people’s livelihoods. Consumption is the main engine driving economic growth. When catering and dining consumption—the “stabilizer”—loses momentum because of a malignant price war, the chill felt by the overall economy will ultimately be transmitted to every micro-level individual. When corporate profits are as thin as paper, or even lose money the moment they open the door, where will jobs come from? And where can wage growth come from?

For this reason, the regulator’s timely move to halt the takeout delivery wars is essentially aimed at maintaining the economy’s normal functioning—preventing malignant competition from disrupting the pace of economic recovery—so that businesses and workers can have normal lives and incomes.

Healthy competition should be a positive contest of technological innovation, efficiency gains, and service optimization, rather than a money-burning game propped up by capital, and not a zero-sum game that uses a monopolistic position to control traffic and force people to take sides. Bring takeout prices back to a reasonable range, help the catering industry escape the dilemma of “it’s dead without subsidies, and it gets chaotic with subsidies,” and shift market competition from “competing by burning cash” to “competing by service”—this is what truly benefits businesses and helps the public.

The price war can’t go far; in a competition of internalized overdrive, there are no winners. The takeout delivery wars should end.

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