Flowers for mother is old school, electronics prove irresistible gift

FOR the first time, instead of flowers, Bai Jiexin has bought her mother “something more practical” for Mother’s Day, which occurred yesterday — an electric toothbrush. “I hope this gift will make her enjoy a higher quality life.”

She doesn’t worry about if her mother, in her 50s, will accept the new device as she has been a technophile for the past 10 years and bought a Sony laptop online as early as 2007.

“Back then, the delivery service wasn’t so convenient. My mom had to travel more than 100 kilometers to get the laptop from the logistic station in another city,” Bai said.

Though her mother was different to her peer group 10 years ago, she is much less distinctive today, as more young people are taking their mothers into a new era through new gifts.

Entering the new century, more Chinese people began to celebrate Mother’s Day and flowers have long been the popular gift.

More people, however, try to buy electronics or smart devices for their mothers in recent years, making the Mother’s Day a new entrance for middleaged or elderly women to have a smarter and more convenient life.

“Bought the cleaning robot as the Mother’s Day gift, a little earlier though, it doesn’t matter compared with freeing mom from the tiring cleaning work,” said a comment, about a cleaning robot, on China’s leading online retailer JD.com.

Both JD.com and rival Tmall.com began their sales campaign several days ahead of this year’s Mother’s Day, with colorful webpages advertising electronics, including not only smartphones but also cleaning robots and smart televisions.

Physical stores have also been welcoming customers brimming with filial piety. Smartphones are the most popular choice. Most customers bought phones priced at less than 2,000 yuan (US$315), which can be used to surf the Internet and take photos, but are not too expensive.

As society undergoes huge changes brought by new technology, with prices of smart devices dropping and new devices coming out, the elderly, who used to think such devices were complicated and unnecessary, have changed their minds.

More than 10 percent of China’s online population was aged over 50 in 2017, said a report jointly released by Chinese Internet giant Tencent and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in March.

About 76 percent of people aged 50and-over now read news online, said the report, which also found e-payments, maps, ride-hailing and online video applications were popular among China’s elderly web users.

Bai’s mother has recently become obsessed with Bilibili, a Chinese video sharing website popular with the post90s generation. “She nicknames it ‘B Station,’ like many young people do,” Bai said.

Worrying about whether the electronic brush is “fresh” enough to surprise her mother, whom Bai describes as “a pioneer of her generation,” Bai is already considering her gift for Mother’s Day next year.

“I’m planning to buy something cooler for her next year,” she said.