Xibei begged for sympathy, then raised prices in a pandemic. The backlash forced a U-turn.

In early 2020, as the pandemic shut China's restaurants, Xibei's founder Jia Guolong became the face of the industry's distress. He said the chain had more than 20,000 employees idle and that, even borrowing to pay wages, it could survive only three months. The plea drew waves of public sympathy for Xibei, a beloved northwestern-cuisine chain.

Then, while the country was still locked down, Xibei quietly raised the prices of some dishes. Diners noticed, and the mood turned: raising prices in a shared crisis, immediately after asking for sympathy, read less like survival than like exploitation. When reporters asked, the company at first denied it — its public-relations head said there had been no increase during the pandemic — which only made the story bigger. "西贝道歉", Xibei apologises, climbed the Weibo trending list.

A week after the denial, on 11 April 2020, Jia Guolong reversed course in person. "We did raise prices," he wrote on Weibo. "Raising prices at a time like this is wrong." He rolled every increased price, delivery and dine-in, back to the standard of 26 January 2020, before the closures, and offered an act of contrition: until the end of May, diners at 386 Xibei stores across 59 cities could eat ¥100 and get ¥50 back. The chain that had won sympathy for its honesty was now paying to get it back.

Rolled every increased price back to the pre-closure standard and paid diners ¥50 back on every ¥100 until end of May, buying back the goodwill the denial had spent.

The pricing ignored the moment. Raising prices during a shared hardship is read as a moral choice, not a commercial one; doing it right after a plea for sympathy made the sympathy look like the setup.

The denial made it worse. Denying the increase for a week turned a pricing complaint into a trust story, and the reversal then read as forced by outrage rather than offered in good faith.

Sympathy is not a balance you can draw down. The goodwill Xibei banked from its founder's honesty was spent the moment prices rose, and had to be repaid with cash — ¥50 back on every ¥100.

The correction came only after the trend. The reversal and compensation were the right move, but arriving after a national outcry, they looked like damage control rather than judgement.

In a crisis, customers judge your prices morally, not economically. If you must raise them, do it openly and first — a denial dragged out of you by outrage costs more than the honesty you skipped.

It was not the last time. Xibei returned to the trending list in 2023 over prices like ¥29 for three dumplings and ¥21 for a steamed bun, and by 2025 its founder had stopped apologising, insisting that "expensive is not the problem." The 2020 episode remains the textbook one: a reminder that in a crisis customers price your behaviour morally, and a denial extracted by outrage costs more than an honest correction offered first.