Selling drinks has always been a great business. You go every where, you see drink stalls. They’re pretty profitable I heard.
Couple of years back, during the time when I was studying in Bukit Batok Secondary School (5 years back?), there is something called the ‘bubble tea’ that arrived to Singapore. I’ll try to describe what this ‘bubble tea’ is.
Bubble tea is not traditional tea. The smart people thought, “duh, we need a new drink, a new concept, frizzy drinks are getting boring.” So the idea of placing round chewy balls into tea came up. These round chewy balls comes in a variety of colors (usually black) and tastes, no bigger than a marble and you need a larger straw to suck out those round chewy balls. These balls are called ‘pearls’.
The whole idea probably originates from Taiwan – land of President Ah Bian. Virtually no one in Singapore would expect it to be such a hot idea from it arrives to our land – land of Lee family.
You have a choice of green tea or red tea. Choose either and they’ll dump the pearls into your tea and – tadah – you get the drink. Of course, that would seem too plain. The people added milk and it becomes ‘pearl milk tea’. That’s not enough still – add flavors. Peppermint, grape, chocolate, lychee – you name it.
The components of the bubble tea is rather simple.
- Green or red tea
- Pearls (Optional)
- Milk (Optional)
- Flavorings (Optional)
The damn thing is so customizable that it spawns like a hundred different type of bubble tea. The styles of blending differs too. There are things like ice blend, snow blend and whatever. Basically, it’s strange adjectives describing the amount of time spent on blending.
And after doing all those, a drink can sell up to SG$3.50! And you wonder who would buy it? How about – half of my secondary school classmates. Some even skip lunches just to get that bubble tea.
It’s a silly drink. I refused to buy it and drink it because it’s just too expensive.
One by one, the bubble tea stalls popped up everywhere. Soon, my area has 3 or 4 and some of which are facing each other directly. Stall owners resort to dirty tricks to gain customers. They got teenagers to stand in the counters to portray the young-and-cool theme of the bubble tea. That’s not all. A stall owner got bikini-claded models to sell bubble tea to attract customers. This method worked, it attracted the young and the old. Wives complained, the government stops the whole bikini thing – much to the husbands dismay.
The stalls still popped up happily, jumping onto the quick profit opportunity. Unfortunately, the market is too saturated and the whole bubble tea industry begin to cannibalize each other’s business. The bubble tea bubble bursts – reminds me of the dot-com boom in 1997 or so.
The bubble tea stalls are closing rapidly. Some stalls opened for just a month and is gone quickly [By the way, one of the brands of bubble tea is called 'Quickly' I recall]. The price fell greatly. Bubble tea can be found priced at SG$1.50 even.
But they are closing. Oh no! I mean, I haven’t really tried them except a couple of sips stolen from others.
One fine day, I walked to the bubble tea stall at the Bukit Batok MRT Station area. There was a bubble tea stall. I bought myself a cup of bubble tea of which flavoring I pretty much chosen by random. It tastes pretty good. My first full cup of bubble tea that I tried.
That cost me a dollar.
[By the way, bubble tea is still popular in Taiwan I think. They call it '珍珠奶茶' (zhen zhu nǎi chá) which is literally translated to 'pearl milk tea'. I heard the first to come to Singapore is Taiwan's CoolStation and it's brought over by a Taiwanese singer whose name I can't seem to remember.]
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Tags: bubble tea, bukit batok, china, culture, food and beverage, singapore, taiwan
[...] apore government won’t accept this though. I just thought this can be applied to the failing bubble tea sales. I think the girl is selling coconut drink, lol [...]
by //beconfused Blog » novel//drinks (Feb 16, 2005 at 12 AM)mmm.. bubble tea , while it was never a fad here – there are just a normal amount of them and the price isn’t cheap but not exorbitant either –
I love the stuff , instead of tapioca balls at the bottom , I’ve tried lychee stuff . Yum
by pketh (Feb 14, 2005 at 9 AM)pketh: I like those that are really well blended. I tried some weird combinations before (at a dollar of course), but you can’t really go very wrong with bubble tea, it’ll still taste like what it is supposed to, hahaa
by Mr. Dew (Feb 14, 2005 at 12 PM)I can easily get bubble tea with pearls for $1 now…
by Serene (Feb 14, 2005 at 6 PM)There’s a Quickly shop near my school…But its been there for at least 3 years. No other bubble tea shops around, and lots of students visit, so they have higher prices than most.
I still haven’t had any Bubble Tea.
by aurora_starfire (Feb 15, 2005 at 12 AM):0(
I always wanted to try it.
OH GEEZ! You actually wrote about bubble tea. I’m such a bubble tea freak, everybody knows haha. They used to be sold only at pasar malams that kind. During the boom, I had up to 7 bubble tea shops at the market just acorss the street from my house. I was so estatic haha. Was even obsessed with this shop called “PP Bubble Tea”, and it cost 2.50 per cup. I could buy like 2 in a day lol.
Now there’s only 1 left, and that shop is smart by charging only $1. I buy almost everyday hahaha. The one at BB ain’t too bad I think. I sometimes go there to buy their bubble tea too…
…. continues going on excited rant
by yingru (Feb 15, 2005 at 12 AM)Bubble tea for a buck?
by aurora_starfire (Feb 15, 2005 at 12 AM)wow…I think they charge around $2 or $3 American for Bubble Tea here.
I’ll have to check it out one day.
Serene: I know of another stall that sells things for expensively – the one at Ngee Ann City (Taka). It’s some CoolStation I think, but it goes by a different name.
aurora_starfire: You should check it out, it tastes pretty good, unless you dislike milk tea, hahaa..
yingru: Wow, you’re sure a fan, hahaa.. I drink bubble tea around twice a week, hahaa.. Depending if I pass by that area. I found Black Pearl somewhere around block 156 of Bukit Batok (that area). It sells at a dollar and it tastes better than the one at Bukit Batok MRT Station. Bubble tea prices sure has fallen by a lot!
by Mr. Dew (Feb 15, 2005 at 7 AM)You know ‘teh tarik’? The tea they sell in any Indian drink stalls here? (The drink is prepared using out-stretched hands to pour piping hot tea from a mug into a waiting glass. The higher the pull the thicker the froth.) Notice the bubbles at the brim? They have real bubbles on real tea. You must have seen or drank one of those. That costs $0.70. And they have been around even before Coke became popular. Now that’s the REAL thing – bubble(d) tea.
by Event Horizon (Feb 15, 2005 at 7 AM)Event Horizon: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention those, hahaa.. I haven’t drank them. But I like to buy tea from the coffee shops. They don’t have teh tarik at my area though. Usually I get myself milk tea which costs about 60 or 70 cents too (w/o ice).
by Mr. Dew (Feb 15, 2005 at 7 AM)There was a bubble tea shop in my city but it went out of business before I got a chance to go there. I had some in China but I don’t know what flavor it was. The tappioca balls are disgusting to me though.
by Jessica (Feb 15, 2005 at 8 AM)Jessica: Disgusting? My girlfriend doesn’t like them too, lol.. Well, it’s a matter of preference I suppose. I quite like them.
by Mr. Dew (Feb 15, 2005 at 8 AM)Yes, the balls sucks. You can chew and chew until your jaws get tired and there will be still more balls left in the drink.
Besides, the balls are taking up too much space. I’m willingly to forgo the balls for a little more tea. Plus, the balls only taste good if they’ve been soaked sufficiently enough in black sugar syrup.
The stall near westmall doesn’t have quality control and can taste quite bland. I work in a bubble tea stall before, at least that one insists on soaking it well enough before selling even if they ran out.
by sky (Feb 15, 2005 at 9 AM)sky: The pearls are alright. I need to chew one something or I’ll just finish the whole drink in seconds, lol..
by Mr. Dew (Feb 15, 2005 at 10 AM)in the beginning the pearls very disgusting to me and i just sucked them up and spit through my straw. ha. then i gradually start eating them like peanuts.
by zhi yang (Feb 15, 2005 at 1 PM)zhi yang: I didn’t enjoy pearls in the beginning too. I want something to chew one, but I don’t like to chew on pearls.
by Mr. Dew (Feb 15, 2005 at 2 PM)How many of you buy the 24 oz bubble tea or is 16 oz is enough. And do you think the price of 24oz $3.50 is ok or expensive. What do you all think the standard price be of 16oz?
by Steve (May 4, 2005 at 7 AM)Steve: Are you conducting a marketing survey? Anyway, in my opinion, 16 oz is enough. I think 24 oz worth of bubble tea may be too much for me. Even for 24 oz, I believe that it is towards the expensive side. In Singapore, we can get bubble tea at SG$1.00 (that would be US$0.61) for 16 oz that comes with the pearls. So for 24 oz, I would assume it to be SG$1.50 (US$0.92), hahaa… But then again, quality does make a difference.
by Mr. Dew (May 4, 2005 at 12 PM)just love it !!
by Sibely (Dec 16, 2005 at 1 PM)love the pearls too
but is very hard to find here in brazil =(
Sibely: They’re in Brazil? Wow… I didn’t know it actually traveled so far!
by Mr. Dew (Dec 17, 2005 at 10 AM)i want to see every body of the girl’s breast so shaw me som thing
by shaakir (Dec 28, 2005 at 12 PM)