Chinese chains – Luckin Coffee and Mixue are pushing into U.S. neighborhoods with mobile ordering, aggressive price promotions, and marketing built to travel—adapting fast-food ideas refined in China’s cutthroat consumer market for American bargain hunters.
On a recent day in Lower Manhattan, the transaction felt less like going to a café and more like completing a task. I ordered at Luckin Coffee, grabbed the drink from the counter, and was back on the street within eight seconds.
My iced coconut latte cost $1.99—69% off its regular price—after I used one of the six active coupons that appeared on the app screen. The speed barely registered. What did register was the hunger for exactly this kind of instant. cheap treat: ready fast. priced low. and sold through apps that turn discounts into a timed game.
Luckin is pushing a coconut latte that it says has been sold more than 2 billion times worldwide since April 2021. And it is arriving in the U.S. at a time when Americans are increasingly drawn to bargains and small indulgences—while Chinese beverage and fast-food chains. shaped by an unforgiving market at home. test whether those habits can win here.
Chinese chains have a head start on the “down economy.” China has been hit hard, and spending is projected to drop 18 points in 2026, according to analysts cited in the piece. For the food-and-beverage sector, that backdrop has sharpened what analysts call an acute oversupply problem.
The pressure is visible on the ground. China now has roughly three times more outlets than the U.S. per capita, saturation that has helped spark a profit-killing race to the bottom. The country is in its third year of the so-called coffee wars. where chains including Luckin (the biggest. with 33. 000 stores) and Cotti (a distant second. at 16. 000) drove prices as low as 40 cents a cup last summer.
That same momentum is part of what is bringing the biggest players to the U.S. In the past year, U.S. consumers have gotten their first Luckin outposts and their first taste of Mixue. described as the world’s largest food-and-beverage chain selling cheese-foam tea and $1 soft serve. They have also seen Cotti coffee shops and Chagee teahouses, plus a twentyfold jump in Heytea cafés.
Food giants are moving too. The piece says Wallace—a KFC rival with 20,000 units—has arrived with a three-for-$10 chicken sandwich deal in California. But the main tide is beverage joints hawking cheap coffee, tea, ice cream, and sweets.
The influx is also a sharp reversal from the 1990s, when American fast-food companies began pouring into China, lured by the pull of a billion new customers. The turnabout, the piece says, has happened with remarkable speed.
The path to the U.S. has been shaped by what Chinese rivals learned—directly or indirectly—from Starbucks’s rise and fall in China.
Three and a half years ago, the reporter described reporting on Starbucks’s aggressive growth strategy in China. Starbucks was opening a new café every nine hours in the country, a pace that left some analysts puzzled. Founder Howard Schultz believed China represented the future: a vast middle class hungry for the “affordable luxury” of Starbucks coffee and his version of modern community. even though coffee was still largely unfamiliar there. By the 2010s, China had become Starbucks’s second-biggest market, and Schultz declared it would overtake the U.S. for the top spot by 2025.
Instead, the opposite happened. Consumers proved reluctant to pay Starbucks prices when homegrown rivals offered cheap drinks. hassle-free mobile orders. quick delivery. and viral menu stunts. The piece describes that Starbucks pursued a pickup-only format in the U.S. after the pandemic—an “ill-fated move” it says Starbucks is only now rectifying—while maintaining a high-end coffeehouse image in China.
Starbucks’s share of China’s coffee market fell from a high of 42% in 2017 to 14% by 2024, while its store count doubled. The piece compares pricing: a latte that cost $4.25 at Starbucks went for $2.25 at Luckin and $1.75 at Cotti.
In April of this year, under new CEO Brian Niccol’s leadership, Starbucks sold its China operation to Boyu Capital, a private-equity firm cofounded by the grandson of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The deal: $4 billion to operate roughly 20% of Starbucks’s 40,000 global stores.
The pressure wasn’t confined to Starbucks. The piece says Tim Hortons, the only other Western coffee chain in China with more than 1,000 stores, saw sales fall 5.4% last year and posted $62 million in losses.
At the same time, the American menu was changing. A decade ago, iced was enough, and “Millennials love cold brew,” Dunkin’ CEO Nigel Travis said after a menu revamp. Schultz also insisted the market for cold coffee drinks was “limitless.”
Today, the piece describes American menus—Starbucks, Dunkin’, Panera, and Dutch Bros. included—as loaded with dragonfruit refreshers with boba pearls, fruit-flavored cold foam, teas stuffed with fruit slices, ube macchiatos, and yuzu-filled croissants.
Where American chains spent years trying to teach China to drink coffee, the piece says it now feels like “Shanghai’s turn to teach Seattle.”
Luckin’s U.S. launch reads like a challenge to the old playbook.
For its first U.S. location, Luckin chose Lower Manhattan, setting up in a shuttered Body Shop on Broadway near Astor Place. The report says heavy foot traffic and proximity to NYU’s campus made it appealing, but it also frames the move as a way to mock Starbucks.
It cites Astor Place as the site of a Starbucks for three decades. briefly the largest in the U.S. used as a study spot. date meetup. and “de facto public restroom.” That café closed unexpectedly in 2024. Store management blamed an “astronomically high” rent hike; the landlord countered that rent stayed the “exact same.” Starbucks cited “the needs of our customers.”.
Months later, in June 2025, Luckin opened what it labeled store No. U.S. 00001 a block away. The numbering system for U.S. locations is said to go up to 99,999. The shop is described as more of a beverage dispensary: accepting no orders in person and featuring just three small tables.
The piece also includes a personal detail: the reporter says it “would probably have popped a vessel” in a younger Howard Schultz.
Across the corner, Starbucks rented the window space on both exposures and hung ads following Luckin’s grand opening. Starbucks also bought a video ad at the intersection’s subway entrance. When the reporter visited, Luckin customers were greeted in two directions by a model smiling with a Starbucks iced coffee.
Those ads, the piece suggests, telegraphed anxiety. Luckin, the piece asks implicitly, couldn’t seriously take over Starbucks’s market share on its home turf—could it?
Last year, Starbucks closed 42 New York cafés as part of a U.S. restructuring plan focused on reviving its “third place” model. It shuttered 400 underperforming stores nationwide, about 1% of its global footprint, with around 100 mobile-order-only locations. When asked whether Luckin’s arrival factored in. Starbucks told the Financial Times that it was “simply ‘doubling down on what customers have always loved about Starbucks—a warm and welcoming coffeehouse with high-quality beverages crafted by a skilled barista.’”.
Since Luckin opened its first U.S. store, the report says it added 15 more Manhattan locations, with at least three more on the way. Store No. 00002 in Chelsea faces a Starbucks, as do three of its other sites. Eight more Luckin locations are described as within a two-block walk.
But chasing Starbucks alone wasn’t the full strategy. The reporter attempted to meet with corporate Luckin representatives at the Financial District’s Fulton Street store. but the meeting was rescheduled and then fell through twice. The reporter was also told to presubmit questions because they needed “approval from China” first.
In response, Luckin later said the topics the reporter asked about were “outside of their current communications parameters.” It did offer a 700-word pre-written Q&A that the piece says Luckin wrote itself.
One prompt asked: “How the brand is approaching localization from a product/marketing perspective. without getting into business strategy or expansion planning.” Luckin answered: “For Luckin. localization is about understanding how coffee and beverage culture fit into local customers’ daily lives. not simply translating a brand from one market to another.”.
On the investor side, the most direct comment came from CEO Jinyi Guo, who called the U.S. “strategically important” to the brand. The report says Luckin’s global store count has increased 39% in the past year. to 33. 596 units. and that Guo believes “Luckin’s unique value propositions and customer experience” are ready to compete in even a “highly developed” coffee market like the United States.
The piece also points to an Instagram post addressed to customers after the Astor Place grand opening that says: “This is just the beginning. NYC, we’re here.”
Luckin’s arrival is only part of the larger push, and Mixue is coming with a different kind of weapon: an earworm that markets like a product.
Mixue—a Chinese ice cream and tea chain founded in 1997—arrived in the U.S. six months ago in a bicoastal strike, opening locations in Los Angeles and New York at the same time. The piece describes the New York City flagship by Herald Square. where on a recent afternoon people queued on a red carpet for boba and ube soft serve in a “Barney shade of purple.”.
The storefront is described as two stories of all red, with a mascot: a snowman named Snow King perched over the phrase “I LOVE YOU YOU LOVE ME”—the lyrics to its world-famous jingle played from loudspeakers “effectively nonstop.” A pedestrian sang along as he passed.
Mixue’s motto. as founder Zhang Hongchao relayed it to Chinese state media. is: “Let people around the world eat well and drink well for just two American dollars.” Since December. the piece says New Yorkers have been paying $1.99 for fresh lemonade and $1.19 for soft serve—half the price of a McDonald’s cone and “likely the cheapest in Manhattan.” Prices are described as slightly higher at L.A.’s Hollywood location.
Fruit teas and sundaes round out the menu, but the report says every customer takes home the Mixue theme song, lodged in their head.
The brand took “Oh! Susanna”—an 180-year-old American folk song about coming from Alabama with a banjo on the knee—and replaced every line of its melody with the same 11-word phrase: “I love you, you love me, Mixue ice cream and tea.”
The marketing agency behind the jingle is Hua & Hua, which works with several top Chinese food and beverage chains. The piece says Hua & Hua is known in China for creating the Super Sign. a method arguing that the most brilliant marketing is often the least creative. Instead of inventing something new. a brand should look for a universal symbol already embedded into culture—like a folk tune. a clown. or a mermaid—and claim it as its own. The report says brother duo Sam and Nan Hua termed this “cultural copyright” in a 2013 book.
The piece gives history: American brands did similar moves in China, where Ronald McDonald posed for photos with party officials and KFC swapped a chicken mascot, Chicky, for the all-American Colonel. Hua & Hua’s “magnum opus,” the report says, is Mixue’s jingle.
Because “Oh!. Susanna” entered the public domain long ago, Mixue paid nothing for it. At December’s Herald Square grand opening, customers who sang the jingle received a free ice cream. The piece says TikTok and Instagram are full of American influencers singing it into their camera. often mangling the name as “Micks-yoo” or “Micks-oo–eey” instead of “Mee-shweh.”.
Earlier this year, Mixue opened its 60,000th global location. More than 55. 000 of its stores are still in mainland China. the piece says. while lines are now forming in Bangkok. Jakarta. and Los Angeles to experience buying tea in Mixue’s carnival atmosphere of animated menu screens. workers dancing in Snow King costumes. machines whirring. and the never-ending jingle.
For Western consumers, the brands are arriving with something familiar—low prices and fast service—but they’re delivered with Chinese design: apps, coupons, and cultural marketing tuned for mass repetition.
The piece closes by framing what could make or break the next wave.
Not long ago. the consensus among Westerners about Chinese retail brands was that they were “good. but not great. and definitely not cool. ” according to the CEO of iMpact. Chris Pereira. as quoted in the piece. Pereira says American consumers’ openness to unusual beverages is something Chinese brands “are still trying to figure out what to do about.”.
The report describes that it took American chains decades to adapt to Chinese customs and palates when they entered in the 1980s and 1990s. Early on. KFC and McDonald’s charged too much—“a little over $1 for a burger. 50 cents for a Coke”—in a society where monthly wages were $17 to $35. The report says that was purposeful, marketing Western fast food as a “treat,” often a family outing dressed up as. McWeddings, it says, emerged from that idea.
As incomes rose and local rivals flooded the market with cheaper burgers and pizza, the luxury aspect waned. By the late 1990s, both chains were becoming dependable family restaurants.
Starbucks arrived in 1999. securing space in Beijing’s China World Trade Center. with an aim to give Chinese consumers a modern. upscale spin on their teahouse tradition. The report says Starbucks turned “third places” into a status symbol for some social strivers and a punch line for others. A source interviewed in 2022 is described recalling satirical advice online in the 2010s about how to “act cool at Starbucks”: order an espresso. carry The Economist. and leave coins on the table so you could wave at staff and say. “I’m used to tipping in America. Keep it.”.
Yet the report says Starbucks seemed to relish the image. “We don’t run a discount company,” Schultz said in 2024 as rivals were practically giving coffee away. The report says he argued, “We’ve already established a premium brand image in the market.”
Pereira’s warning. as framed in the piece. is that the tension between what a brand is at home and what it becomes abroad can trap companies during expansion. He says it plays out in menu design. cultural signaling. workforce practices. and even naming conventions—“Get the balance wrong in any of these directions and you lose. ” he says.
The reporter then lands on the Mixue jingle as the clearest example of translation back into American culture: “Oh!. Susanna” has a complicated U.S. history. The report says its national popularity made Stephen Foster America’s first professional songwriter. but the song is rooted in blackface minstrel traditions and was later rewritten to remove explicit racism. What remains, the report says, is a vaguely Southern-sounding ditty that many people can sing just a few words of.
Whether Mixue knew about that tangled history, the reporter says it couldn’t tell. Company representatives didn’t respond in time to inquiries.
Still, the piece argues, the practical impact is already felt. Since hearing it. the reporter says they can’t get the song out of their head: “I love you. you love me. Mixue ice cream and tea.” The reporter asks whether it even matters if it makes no sense—arguing that it taps into something simple and global: an appetite for things that are easy to consume without thinking.
Luckin Coffee Mixue Mixue Ice Cream & Tea Cotti Chagee Heytea Wallace Starbucks Boyu Capital Howard Schultz Brian Niccol Jinyi Guo U.S. expansion mobile ordering coupons coffee wars cultural marketing