Luckin has quietly taken over a former Starbucks at Lanhai International Plaza, opening a new two-story store just a short walk from the Oriental Pearl Tower. Normally, Luckin is the kind of place you order, grab, and leave. Efficient, forgettable, designed for speed. This one is doing something else.
The space keeps the old Starbucks bones: high ceilings, arched doorways, a faint European café vibe. But the prices have collapsed from 30–50rmb to 9.9rmb. Walking in feels like Luckin dropped its usual operating system into a boutique café.
Downstairs is familiar territory, order, pick up, move on. Upstairs is where things get interesting. There are open reading areas and semi-enclosed corners that feel closer to a shared study or quiet office than a coffee shop. There's no public WiFi, which makes the scene even stranger: on a weekday afternoon, the place is packed anyway. People are sitting, reading, working, lingering, all the things Luckin usually doesn't encourage.
It says a lot about how Shanghai drinks coffee now. Convenience wins. Price sensitivity wins. But context matters too. Put a 9.9rmb coffee next to the Oriental Pearl view, give people space to sit, and suddenly the grab-and-go brand becomes somewhere people actually stay.
Whether this turns into a new direction or remains a one-off experiment is hard to say. Either way, it's worth a look, if only to sip a 9.9rmb coffee upstairs and watch how fast things change.
