Wedome (味多美) Won't Hire Beijing Residents: The Labor Economics Behind a Loaf of Bread

Hiring rule or arithmetic?

It has been reported that Wedome (味多美) recruiters told multiple candidates bluntly that the company "does not consider Beijing locals" when they disclosed a Beijing hukou. Reportedly one recruiter equated local candidates with "poor stability" and, when confronted, backtracked to blame candidate ability. This is not an isolated anecdote — Huxiu (虎嗅) found several similar accounts — and the bluntness exposes a calculated personnel strategy rather than mere prejudice.

Why would a Beijing-born bakery refuse Beijing workers?

Jihai (极海) brand monitoring data help explain the economics. Of 516 stores monitored nationwide, 340 are operating and 174 closed; the network is heavily concentrated in a handful of places and overwhelmingly in top-tier cities. Among currently operating outlets, 74.1% sit in first-tier cities, 19.1% in new first-tier and only 5.3% in second-tier — a 93.5% skew to high-cost urban cores. Rents and other fixed costs in shopping centres routinely eat a large slice of revenue, so managers seek to compress labour costs. Migrant or non-local hires, who often rent privately and lack fallback options, are perceived as cheaper, more compliant labour — a vulnerability firms can price into their staffing models.

A shrinking network that doubles down on expensive markets

The chain’s store pool has already started to shrink: Wedome’s surviving store count fell from 354 at the start of 2024 to 342 in early 2026, a net drop of 12. Closures are concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai — 48 and 37 shops closed in those cities respectively — even as new openings remain biased toward high-tier locations (86.7% of new surviving stores are in first and new first-tier cities). In short: the company is cutting and recalibrating in the priciest markets while still betting on those same markets for growth. Can that arithmetic hold?

Bigger picture and implications

This hiring posture is less about local workers’ skills than about a management model that depends on workers with limited bargaining power. That model rode China’s decades-long urban influx; now demographic shifts (Beijing’s resident population has declined since 2023) and wider labour-market changes are loosening that supply. The result: what looks like arrogance — "no locals" — is also a sign of corporate anxiety. For consumers who buy Wedome’s bread in affluent neighbourhoods, the staff keeping the shelves stocked may increasingly be outsiders whose precarity has been factored directly into the company’s cost model.