In early 2025, the daily rental price of a humanoid robot could surge to CNY 15,000. During the National Day holiday this year, the quoted price for the same Yushu robot on Xianyu is CNY 289 per day.
Prices have collapsed by 98%. But what is more interesting than the price is that during this National Day holiday, nearly 30 embodied AI companies sent thousands of robots into scenic spots, shopping malls, and amusement parks—most of them are no longer dancing.
They are selling goods, patrolling, making ice cream, and working as tour guides. The drop in daily rent from tens of thousands of CNY to less than CNY 1,000 does not necessarily mean the industry is cooling down; it could also mean that humanoid robots are transitioning from "internet celebrities" to "temporary workers". The real question worth paying attention to lies ahead: Can these "temporary workers" actually do the job? And after doing the job, can they make a living?
01. The Real "Working" Record of Robots During the Seven-Day National Day Holiday
Kuawei Zhineng operates over 30 robotic commercial service kiosks in cities such as Guangzhou, Guilin, and Xi'an, where humanoid robots make ice cream, coffee, and popcorn on-site. Throughout the Golden Week, these kiosks received a total of over 110,000 visitor trips. A single robot served over 500 orders per day on average, and the best-performing flagship store achieved a total revenue of CNY 150,000 during the holiday.
What does 500 orders a day mean? Calculated based on 10 hours of operation in the scenic spot, it averages 50 orders per hour, requiring a complete process of ordering, making, and delivery to be completed in less than a minute and a half. This is no longer a "performance"; it is truly running a business workflow.
Yinhe Tongyong's path leans more towards "unmanned retail". Its humanoid robot, Galbot G1, works as a salesperson in a mobile vending cart in the Jingdezhen Taoxichuan Cultural and Creative Block, independently completing the entire process of welcoming guests, product recommendation, ordering and payment, grasping, and delivery. Meanwhile, its "Smart Retail Space Capsule" has been deployed in scenic spots such as Yiheyuan, Yuanmingyuan, Badaling Great Wall, and Dunhuang Mingshashan, landing about 200 sites in approximately 50 cities nationwide, operating a 7x24-hour retail business.
AgiBot takes the "human-robot collaboration" route. On the eve of the National Day holiday, the world's first large-scale embodied AI theme park, created in collaboration between AgiBot and Changlong Group, opened at the Zhuhai Hengqin Feichuan Amusement Park. Over 300 robots were deployed to more than 100 interactive experience points, covering seven major scenarios including tour guiding and shopping assistance, service retail, intelligent accompanying tour, hotel service, and sports competition. At the same time, 100 AgiBot Lingxi X2 robots entered 100 Aishida stores nationwide to serve as promoters, operating for 2,460 hours, receiving 95,400 customer visits, and achieving an interaction frequency of 289,300 times.
Robots under AgiBot also entered BURTON and Aweidan brand stores as "one-day store managers", responsible for customer interaction, guiding store tours, and consultation recommendations. The result is: Aweidan stores saw an 86% year-on-year increase in sales on October 1, and Burton's average transaction value per customer increased by 16% during the National Day holiday.
02. Plummeting Rent: Not Because They Cannot Be Rented, but Because the Jobs Have Changed
Putting these cases together, a clear transformation can be seen: the functional boundaries of robots have expanded from "putting on a show for people" to "doing the work for people".
After the 2025 Spring Festival Gala made humanoid robots popular, the rental market experienced a frantic "rush to rent" wave, with daily rents once surging to the tens of thousands of CNY level. The deep reason for the current plunge in rental prices is not just the crowded track, but also the fact that "robot performances" have become severely homogenized, and novelty is no longer a scarce resource.
The most significant change during this year's National Day holiday is that robots are no longer just "check-in props", but have begun to enter real service processes. Kuawei Zhineng's 500 daily orders per robot, Yinhe Tongyong's 200 retail sites, and AgiBot's 300 normalized deployments at Changlong—behind these numbers is the signal of robots migrating from "holiday temporary workers" to "daily operational roles". This direction of migration exactly aligns with national policy signals.
03. After the Hustle and Bustle, Three Questions That Cannot Be Avoided
The National Day data looks good, but after the holiday ends, the industry needs to face several practical issues.
First, there is foot traffic during the Golden Week, but what about weekdays? The business model of retail in scenic spots is highly dependent on foot traffic. Whether the data of 500 daily orders per robot during the National Day holiday can be maintained on weekdays is the key to judging whether this scenario can work. If foot traffic drops sharply on weekdays, the robot's output may not even cover operation and maintenance costs.
Second, who pays for equipment maintenance and on-site backup? Behind a humanoid robot, there is a need for a cloud knowledge base, remote operation and maintenance, and on-site technical support. Kuawei Zhineng disclosed that its robotic commercial applications have accumulated 25,000 hours of operation time. Behind these operation hours is continuous investment in operation and maintenance. When robots transition from "performance mode" to "service mode", the failure rate and maintenance costs will significantly increase.
Third, how to quantify the value created by robots? In the Aishida case, the core goal of the 100 robots over three days was "interactive traffic generation + data verification". Currently, humanoid robots mainly undertake the exposure of the brand's technological sense and the first-stage shopping guide function, while language models and complex functions are still undergoing continuous upgrades. The sales increase data for BD and Aweidan certainly looks good, but how much of this increase comes from the robots themselves and how much comes from the natural foot traffic during the National Day holiday still requires more rigorous attribution analysis.
IDC reports show that in the first half of 2026, global humanoid robot shipments approached 25,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 432.1%, of which China's shipments exceeded 19,000 units, accounting for about 77.9% of the global total. The volume has picked up, but the reminder from Wei Guohong, a member of the China Robot CR Education and Training Standards Committee, is worth noting: the current statistical caliber of institutional shipments still includes scientific research procurement and display prototypes, the proportion of pure commercial paid orders remains to be increased, and a high shipment rate does not mean that enterprises have achieved profitability.
During the seven-day National Day holiday, robots proved that they "can take their posts". But from "being able to take their posts" to "being able to make a living", there are still three hurdles in between: foot traffic fluctuations, operation and maintenance costs, and value quantification.
The rent of CNY 289 a day is the pricing given by the market—it means the bubble of "novelty" has burst. The next question is, if robots no longer make money by relying on "novelty", what will they rely on?
This article is compiled based on publicly available network information, for reference only, and does not constitute investment advice.