Pang Dong Lai Will Move Its Staff to a 35-Hour Week From March 2027

Yu Donglai, the founder of the Henan supermarket chain Pang Dong Lai, announced on his personal Weibo account on the evening of September 30 that from March 2027 the company will move to a five-day week with seven-hour days — a 35-hour week — for employees and managers alike. His stated aim was to use real action to let more people "work and live easily and happily."

The chain's arrangements were already generous by Chinese retail standards. Managers mostly work two-day weekends on seven-hour days, with 160 to 170 days off a year. Ordinary staff have until now worked a single weekly rest day, 40 to 42 hours, and around 145 days off, at an average salary of 9,400 yuan a month — high for retail work in a prefecture-level city like Xuchang, where the chain is based.

The announcement carried a wrinkle Yu himself has publicized. He once asked employees whether they would accept 1,000 yuan less each month in exchange for more rest that would bring their total vacation to around two months a year; by his account, 80 percent refused. Paid time off, in other words, is not automatically what Pang Dong Lai's own workers say they want — an honest complication in a story otherwise told as pure uplift.

On Weibo, the reaction treated the news less as a corporate announcement than as an indictment of everyone else. "The answers are all here — copy the homework," one user wrote, using the phrase Chinese social media reaches for when an obvious solution sits unadopted; if every company worked this way, the post went on, there would be far less anxiety over employment, birth rates and young people's spending. Another commenter said she was "tired of saying how envious I am": the chain's famous service and its pay are two sides of one arrangement, generous treatment keeps staff motivated, and that is what customers are actually paying for.

The wider context is a labor culture where "996" — nine to nine, six days a week — became shorthand for tech-industry overwork, and where six-day weeks remain common in shops and delivery. Pang Dong Lai has turned the opposite premise into a national brand: well-paid, well-rested staff deliver the no-questions-asked returns and obsessive freshness standards that draw shoppers from across the country. CCTV has called the stores a "6A-level scenic spot with no off-season," the local government runs special bus routes to their doors, and the company's earlier experiments — four-year contracts for new hires that are never renewed, 50,000-yuan bonuses for 'zero bride price' weddings — each made national news. In August, Yu disclosed that not one of the former prisoners the chain hired had quit, citing a culture of respect and dignity.

The 35-hour pledge climbed to the eighth spot on Baidu's hot search board within hours of the post. What nobody has answered is the question one commenter put most plainly: the homework is written, and no other Chinese retailer has yet copied it.