The food delivery war should come to an end.

Ask AI · Why the Food Delivery Subsidy War Has Become a Roadblock to Consumer Recovery?

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

In the past few days, have you received any free-order coupons from a food delivery platform? At a recent press conference, the State Administration for Market Regulation disclosed the latest progress in its anti-monopoly investigation into food delivery platforms. It said that regulators have moved into the relevant platforms to carry out on-site inspections, and the next steps will further transmit regulatory pressure through methods such as questionnaires and document verification, and study response and disposal measures. This sends a clear message to the market: the疯狂 food delivery war must be shut down!

At first glance, the food delivery war seems to benefit the public; in reality, it is dog-eat-dog internal competition.

For consumers, the food delivery war is indeed “appealing.” Who doesn’t like a milk tea for 1 yuan or coffee for 3 yuan? However, what’s free is often the most expensive. When we shift our focus from the free-order coupons in our phones to the entire macroeconomic picture, we find that the cost of this war is ultimately being borne by ordinary people—and far more than expected.

The most direct impact shows up in macroeconomic data. From the end of Q2 to Q3 in 2025, the CPI—reflecting China’s residents’ consumer prices—continued to fall, and the consumer market remained cold. But oddly, if you strip out food and energy, the core CPI instead has been rising all along. This suggests that consumption should be recovering, yet something is pulling it down hard.

What’s pulling it down is restaurants.

In China’s CPI basket, the combined weight of food, tobacco, and alcohol, as well as food consumed out of home, is close to 30%, the highest among all categories. This means that when restaurant prices rise, the CPI may jump accordingly; when restaurant prices fall, the CPI may drop just as sharply.

With this background in mind, you can see clearly in the data: from the end of Q2 to Q3 in 2025, China’s restaurant revenue growth rate slowed down, and the timing and trajectory of the decline closely match the downward curve of the overall CPI. Meanwhile, during the same period, housing and transportation communications—also with high weights—did not show a similar decline.

And this is precisely the period when the food delivery war was at its most intense and platform subsidies were at their most frantic. Financial reports show that during the food delivery war, Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan accumulated subsidies totaling between 80 billion and 100 billion yuan. The China Hotel and Restaurant Association said that the price declines driven by large-scale subsidy actions among platforms became an important factor constraining the restaurant industry’s growth since June 2025. According to Meituan’s observations, this war directly pushed the average dining-in spend per customer back to what it was 10 years ago.

On the surface, the food delivery war is platforms giving up margins. But from a macro perspective, it is a severe shock to the restaurant industry’s pricing system. To survive the subsidy war, catering businesses have no choice but to sacrifice quality and compress profits. The whole industry falls into a vicious cycle of losing money to keep up appearances, ultimately dragging down the broader trend toward consumer recovery—which is exactly contrary to the central government’s work arrangements to boost consumption, adding unnecessary resistance to macroeconomic regulation and control.

The food delivery war affects not only restaurant owners’ ledgers, but also the livelihoods of ordinary people. Consumption is the main engine that drives economic growth. When restaurant consumption—serving as a “stabilizer”—loses momentum due to a vicious price war, the chill felt by the overall economy will ultimately spread to every micro-level individual. When business profits are as thin as paper, or even turning losses just to keep the doors open, where will jobs come from? And where would wage growth come from?

For this very reason, when regulators moved in time to halt the food delivery war, they were essentially protecting the economy’s normal operation—preventing malicious competition from disrupting the rhythm of economic recovery, and ensuring that enterprises and workers can have normal lives and incomes.

Healthy competition should be a fair contest of technological innovation, efficiency improvements, and service optimization—not a money-burning game propped up by capital piles, and not a zero-sum battle that uses monopoly positions to control traffic and force sides. Let food delivery prices return to a reasonable range. Let the restaurant industry escape the dilemma of “if we don’t subsidize, we die; if we subsidize, we get chaotic.” Let competition shift from “compete by smashing money” to “compete by improving service.” That is the true way to benefit businesses and the public.

Price wars don’t go far; internal competitive pressure has no winner. The food delivery war should end. (Source of this article: Economic Daily; Author: Yu Ying)