The price comes
with consequences.

A clip of Zhong Shanshan — the Nongfu Spring founder, and depending on the week, the richest man in China — is flooding Chinese social media. In it, he is not promoting water. He is declaring war on the platform economy. The line that travels: the platforms arrived promising to cut out the middleman — and ended up becoming the biggest middleman of all.

The middleman they swore to kill

Remember the pitch. Factory to consumer. No distributors, no layers, no markup — the internet would connect maker and buyer directly, and everyone would keep the difference. For a while it was even true.

Then the platforms did what every middleman in history does once it controls the road: it started charging for the road. Commissions, ad fees, deposit schemes, forced subsidies, price-matching mandates. The old middlemen took their cut and moved your goods. The new one takes its cut, keeps your customer, holds your data, and sets your price. Zhong's word for it is blunter than mine: a middleman with no bottom line.

The sellers are waking up. The buyers are not.

Producers have started to notice. Brands are pulling out of subsidy campaigns, building their own channels, selling direct again. That is the seller side of the awakening — and it is real, but it is slow, because the platforms still hold the one thing that matters: the crowd. And the crowd is there for one reason. The low price.

Every seller who leaves is replaced by one who will take the traffic at any margin. The platform does not need any particular seller. It needs the queue of them — and the queue exists because we, the buyers, keep voting for whoever is cheapest.

You are responsible for your choice

Here is where I part company with most commentary on this, because after years of running businesses on both sides of the checkout, my philosophy has hardened into something simple: you are responsible for your choice.

The person who buys everything on the platform for the extra discount and the free voucher — usually on products built down to a price, not up to a standard — is not a bystander to the squeeze on producers. They are the squeeze. The discount does not come from nowhere. It comes out of the factory's margin, then the factory worker's overtime, then the factory's town. Round after round, the money that used to be somebody's salary becomes everybody's coupon.

And then — this is the part nobody wants to hear — the same person complains that their own income has stopped growing. Of course it has. Their employer sells into the same economy they are hollowing out at checkout. You cannot bid every price to the floor and expect your own price to hold. The price comes with consequences. Cheap is not a discovery; it is a transfer — and eventually the transfer reaches you.

The vote you cast at checkout

I am not asking anyone to boycott platforms. Convenience is real, and some categories belong there. I am saying the checkout is a ballot. Buy only on price, and you elect an economy where price is the only thing anyone can compete on — a race where the finish line is everyone earning less. Pay for quality, buy direct where it matters, and you fund the kind of business that can afford to pay people properly. Including, one day, you.

Zhong is fighting the platform from the top, with a fortune to protect him. Most sellers cannot. But every buyer can do the one thing the platform cannot control: choose differently. That has been our position at IMA AI from the start — we build brands their own front door, so the direct choice exists. Whether people walk through it is, as always, their choice. And their consequence.