For me, the annual "hometown observations" during the Spring Festival have always served as a vital window into the micro-level capillaries of the Chinese economy. This Year of the Horse, due to my personal schedule, I did not return to my hometown of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, but instead chose to stay in Shanghai for the holiday. Although there was no significant geographical relocation, spending the long holiday as an "out-of-towner" in Shanghai provided me with a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the ongoing evolution in consumption patterns, particularly the robust demand for service consumption among residents.
From the grand narrative of the macroeconomy, we are at a critical juncture of technological transformation. The rapid iteration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanoid robotics is driving exponential leaps in productivity within industrial manufacturing and fundamental cognitive fields. However, a potential phase of structural contradiction may emerge between rapidly rising productivity and resident employment: as machines increasingly replace standardized labor positions, how can we better implement an employment-first strategy?
Based on my observations in Shanghai this Spring Festival, I believe the answer is becoming clearer: service consumption, especially activities that provide emotional value and involve deep human interaction and communication, is not only a core driver of future economic growth but also a key solution for absorbing employment and alleviating this structural issue.
I. Logistics Services Bridging Time and Space: A Microcosm of a Healthy Economic Cycle When celebrating the festival away from home, the strongest connection is the emotional bond with one's hometown. Before the holiday, I received several packages of New Year goods sent by my family from Shijiazhuang and also sent gifts back to my relatives. This was made possible by the "no holiday closure" service commitment from leading logistics companies. The continuous operation of the express delivery network during the Spring Festival provides a solid link for residents to convey affection across time and space. For groups like myself who cannot return home, the emotional comfort and value provided by this type of service consumption are immeasurable.
From the perspective of the macroeconomic cycle, this high-quality, efficient demand for service consumption is translating into substantive income for service providers, thereby promoting a virtuous economic cycle. When I sent gifts back to Shijiazhuang before the holiday, I noticed that express delivery prices were higher than usual. According to service announcements from companies like SF Express, to cope with constrained resource allocation, a dynamic peak-season resource adjustment fee was added to delivery services during the Spring Festival.
Such price increases, which align with market principles and adjust dynamically with the labor supply and demand structure during the holiday, ultimately translate into reasonable income compensation for frontline workers. In accordance with China's labor laws and the "2026 Spring Festival Travel Delivery Service Guarantee Work Plan" issued by the State Post Bureau on January 27, as well as related reports, couriers working during core periods of the Spring Festival holiday are legally entitled to triple or double pay, which must be disbursed fully and promptly. The chain of rising service consumption demand → phased increase in service prices → substantive increase in worker income → enhanced subsequent consumption capacity of the worker population is a typical micro-example of how service consumption drives the domestic economic cycle.
II. Experiential Consumption in Offline Commercial Districts: Emotional Value Driving Physical Prosperity Beyond logistics services, the performance of Shanghai's major physical commercial districts during the Spring Festival also confirms residents' strong demand for offline service consumption. Unlike the simple "buy, buy, buy" of the past, today's physical commercial districts increasingly serve functions of "experience" and "social interaction."
During the holiday, I visited several commercial landmarks in Shanghai's Hongkou District. Consumer goods were abundantly supplied in major supermarkets and stores before the festival, which were crowded with people and filled with a strong festive atmosphere. Furthermore, business hours across commercial districts almost fully covered the entire holiday period, accompanied by a variety of rich folk interactive activities. For instance, Jinchao 8 Nong in Hongkou District held a Spring Festival lantern fair with distinctive Shanghai-style characteristics, while Ruihong XinTiandi hosted folk performances and interactive experiences like lion dances.
The essence of these activities is upgrading simple merchandise retail into comprehensive "service consumption." By enhancing the festive atmosphere and providing immersive cultural experiences, commercial districts successfully attracted large numbers of residents to leave their homes. People were consuming not just food, beverages, and general merchandise, but also time spent with family and a sense of ritual for the New Year. This emotional-value-oriented service consumption likely significantly extended residents' dwell time and increased spending per capita, demonstrating greater market elasticity.
III. Macroeconomic Data Corroboration: Strong Momentum in Travel and Cultural Tourism Consumption The intuitive micro-level observations are perfectly corroborated by macroeconomic data. This Spring Festival, residents' demand for service consumption such as travel and cultural tourism showed strong growth momentum.
Taking Shanghai as an example, one set of data is particularly striking: On the first day of the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, Shanghai received 2.5612 million tourist visits, a year-on-year increase of 38.97%. This data not only reflects Shanghai's strong appeal as a core national cultural tourism destination but also indicates that household balance sheets are gradually recovering after past fluctuations. Consumption is undergoing a profound structural shift—tilting from traditional goods consumption towards service consumption like cultural tourism, leisure, and entertainment. Service consumption is gradually transforming from a past "discretionary spend" into a "necessity" in modern residents' lives.
IV. New Pathways in Service Consumption Stimulate New Societal Supply Based on the above observations and data, we can draw a solid conclusion: Service consumption holds great potential for the future. Against the backdrop of powerful productivity gains from AI and robotics, service consumption is not only an engine for stimulating domestic demand but also a social stabilizer for reshaping the employment structure. In the future, the expansion pathways for service consumption are likely to progress multi-dimensionally, continuously stimulating the emergence of new societal supply.
On one hand, technological innovation will significantly activate cultural service consumption from the supply side. For example, the generative AI tool "Seedance2.0," which generated heated discussion in tech and investment circles before the festival, has technical features that break down the high barriers of traditional film and television production. In the future, it might truly enable "everyone to be a director." This democratization of productivity will not eliminate the cultural industry but instead lead to further vibrancy in film and television content creation, spawning a massive amount of niche content services and personalized digital consumption demands.
On the other hand, demographic changes and the emergence of new demands are forcing institutional innovation in physical service formats. With the deepening of population aging, the demand for elderly care services is becoming increasingly prominent. During the Spring Festival, a period when domestic workers often return to their hometowns, a "care shortage" becomes a pressing issue for many families. Addressing this "bottleneck" in service consumption, the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau this year collaborated with nearly 400 elderly care institutions and community senior care centers to launch a "Warm Spring Festival Short-term Care" service. This innovative measure, combining public policy and market supply, not only addresses the urgent needs of families with elderly members through professional care but also fosters a new细分 segment of service consumption—"short-term care services"—creating a significant number of nursing positions that cannot be easily replaced by machines.
During this Spring Festival spent away from home, I genuinely felt the warmth of service industry workers and witnessed the firm strides in the transformation of China's economic structure. As machines become increasingly intelligent, human emotion, care, and creativity will become increasingly precious. Service consumption is not merely a growth point in economic data; it is a crucial cornerstone for maintaining social vitality and employment resilience in the era of artificial intelligence. In the future, the prospects are vast, and there is much potential to be realized.