RT-Mart lets Shanghai's lockdown staples speak — 'cold-palace vegetables' copy tops Weibo

In June 2022, as Shanghai emerged from two months of lockdown, shoppers at RT-Mart hypermarkets found their vegetables talking. Carrots complained that they were 'never your favourite — allow me to leave with dignity'; cabbage admitted it was 'no longer the dish you want'; potatoes asked why every sprout had to be a happy occasion. Posters labelled these over-supplied staples 'cold-palace vegetables', while scarce treats — spring onions, garlic, eggs, cola, crisps — were crowned 'supermarket A-listers'.

The idea came from the stores themselves. RT-Mart had been one of the city's main supply channels during the lockdown, so its team knew exactly which five vegetables residents had eaten for two months: potatoes, carrots, white radish, onions and cabbage, nicknamed the 'five ration brothers'. The Zhongyuan store manager, Chen Runxin, said the roughly 19 poster sets were meant as a farewell to that shared experience and a way to bring customers back after reopening.

The copywriting took the form of first-person confessions on simple shelf posters, placed next to the actual produce. There was no media campaign behind it: shoppers discovered the posters, photographed them, and posted them online on 5 June 2022. Within roughly a day the hashtag #上海大润发文案 reached the top of Weibo's hot-search list; readers who had lived through the same two months recognised every line.

The effect went beyond one store. The agency tally counted about 7 billion exposures across platforms and more than 100 media mentions, and the 'smoke-and-fire literature' style became RT-Mart's signature: later series gave vegetables 'market slang', wrote 'barbecue literature' for summer, and in August 2023 partnered with publisher Dook to run a 'give yourself some time' edition across 44 renovated stores.