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.