（Photo/Xinhua）

Recently, a self-service tea-house was established in Wuhan, attracting many people to enjoy their tea time while also enjoying the self-service, low charge, and zero-peddling features of the facilities.

Drinking tea is gradually becoming a popular activity for some young individuals when they have free time.

Enjoying the self-service tea-house for only 38 yuan per hour

Liucha Yashangdao, a self-service tea-house near Northwest Lake in Wuhan, is different from other tea-houses. At such houses, customers are required to handle everything by themselves, including takes such as reservation as well as tea making.

Customers are supposed to go to the official tea-house account page on WeChat and make a reservation for their desired arrival time as well as to set the length of time for their tea session, and then make a telephone confirmation with the staff , and pay a deposit of 99 yuan. Customers will receive a password to enter the tea-house about 10 minutes before the time they have been allotted. The password will be automatically changed when the time of their reservation has passed.

At present, the self-service tea-house is able to accommodate 5-8 people at a time, and the hourly rental fee is 38 yuan.

White-collar workers can chat more comfortably now

In Wuhan, there are about 20 similar self-service tea-houses, many of which are located on the upper floors of office buildings. Zhou Chen, the founder of Liucha Yashangdao Tea-house, said that locating the self-service tea-house on the upper floor of the office building can not only reduce operating costs, but also makes it easy get more white-collar workers interested in tea culture.

It is reported that the main target group of the self-service tea-house is white-collar workers. The self-service tea-house is suitable for company meetings, private gatherings as well as other activities. Therefore, Zhou's self-service tea-house is facilitated with projection equipment, chess and other entertainment facilities.

Urban Civilization Has Been Tested

According to Hu Huaimin, an associate professor from China University of Geosciences, the emergence of "self-service business" can be attributed to the development of information technology as well as general rising operation costs. With the rapid development of the Internet and artificial intelligence, convenient and cheap self-service business such as self-service car washes, self-service restaurants and self-service supermarkets are all gaining more popularity with citizens.

In addition, the “self-service mode” can to some extent also test the quality of citizens.

“Not a single tea set was damaged or stolen after the opening of the tea-house. The quality of the guests was generally high and the projection equipment was not damaged,” said Zhou.

Yuan Chunlin, chairman of an environmental technology company in Wuhan, has the same feeling as Zhou. Yuan’s company has set up a total of 80 self-service car washing stations. One self-service car washing station includes two self-service car washing machines, and the cost of constructing one self-service car washing machine is 30,000 yuan. However, he is still confident about the market in Wuhan.

“Wuhan popularized the concept of ‘self-service businesses’ with its highly proactive citizens,” said Yuan.