Production | Tiger Sniff Business Group
Author ｜ 刘 然
Supermarket stores are becoming smaller at a faster pace —
Ni Xiaojun, the person in charge of Hema mini, revealed at the event recently that Hema mini, which has opened 6 stores in Shanghai, will accelerate its large-scale opening this year and go out of Shanghai to replicate across the country, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, etc. city.
Another news about “mini shop” comes from RT-Mart. According to the report of “ Third Look at Retail “, RT-Mart is planning Opened a new store-type RT-Mart mini, positioning a community supermarket with an area of 500 to 1,000 square meters. It is planned to be the first to test the water in Nantong. The relevant team is currently looking for suitable properties.
Yonghui and Wal-Mart started earlier, and the number of Yonghui minis that have been made since 2018 has exceeded 500. Wal-Mart has also proposed the concept of a “compact hypermarket” long ago, and opened its first community store format in April 2018, which will be replicated throughout the country this year.
Even IKEA, which is one step behind in e-commerce, is hurrying to get rid of “Little IKEA”-if nothing else, in the next two months, a small IKEA store should appear in Yangpu District, Shanghai .
Currently, the thinking of the seller and the purchaser has changed quietly: consumers are beginning to feel that compared to shopping centers and large shopping malls that are a few kilometers away, they can buy or even buy goods within an hour. Home delivery software is more fragrant; people who open stores also gradually feel that compared with the efficiency and cost of large supermarkets, it is more profitable to open a few small supermarkets, so it is necessary to open more stores and open more small stores. shop.
So the mini shop is really more delicious?
Do you want to expand, open a mini shop
The ebb of foreign retail has just ended, and local retail has unprecedented opportunities for transcendence. However, the opportunities are still based on the fact that they are ready for the next stage of competition: In 2020, as the population of first- and second-tier cities is growing, One-stop shopThe change of purchasing habits and the task of the store has become a transformation around the words digital and community.
Hema, which has been labeled with a new retail label for a long time, has been in bloom for the past two years. Except for Hema, which is a shopping mall, other new formats are developing to “small”.
In March last year, Huma Yi, the president of Hema, proposed that Hema ’s future store system is “one big and four small”: Hema fresh and big stores / standard stores over 800 square meters, covering the mall scene, the model is still fresh + Supermarket + Catering + Takeaway; the four small formats of Hema Vegetable Market, Hema F2, Hema Station and Hema mini cover more sophisticated and sinking markets, and the model is simpler. The box pony is a convenience store version of Hema Xiansheng, while the box horse mini is mainly in bulk non-standard products, and is mostly located in suburbs and counties.
In the middle of last year, Hema Xiansheng opened the first Hema mini (Original Box Horse ), Compared to a family of Hema fresh, which has an area of several thousand square meters, the area of Hema mini is usually about 500 ~ 1000 square meters. (even smaller) , the store’s categories include more than 4,000 products such as aquatic products, fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry, and even cooked food, and residents with a radius of 1.5 kilometers.
From the current information, the positioning and shape of all mini stores on the market have common characteristics: small area, fresh produce accounted for more than 50%, vegetables are mostly in bulk, and so on.
For example, the area of Yonghui mini is also 300-1000 square meters, and its positioning is “Yonghui at the doorstep”. The products are mainly fresh products such as bulk vegetables, fruits, aquatic products, and meat, supplemented by food and daily necessities. .
In the third retail report mentioned above, RT-Mart ’s mini store will also be located around the community. It is best to be located near the entrance and exit of the community. The opening of the facade is not less than 16 meters, and the store is within a radius of 500 meters. Residents have more than 3,000 households, and are more than 1.5 kilometers away from RT-Mart and Auchan stores. Although the specific product structure and main categories have not been disclosed, according to the above store type and store location planning, fresh produce should be a key direction.
For hypermarkets who are struggling with the location of the store and are difficult to improve the efficiency, the advantages of opening a small store are obvious: low cost, copyHurry, come quickly.
The premise of bulk copy is that the mode has worked. The specific operation of Hema mini is unknown, but Hou Yi said in July last year: Hema mini opened three months ago, and its efficiency is higher than Hema store. The cost of logistics and distribution is lower, and online orders account for more than 50%. And the investment cost is only one-tenth of Hema Xiansheng’s big store.
In anticipation, mini stores have lower costs, easier and more flexible site selection, correspondingly shorter payback periods, and much faster results than hypermarkets. However, the small format that is being explored is also facing the problem that anxious all fresh food retailers, that is, overall profitability.
More shops are still waiting for cash. According to CICC’s forecast, the annual loss of Yonghui mini stores in 2019 will be about 200 million yuan, and the expansion of Yonghui mini stores will still weigh on the performance of Yonghui supermarket in the short term. However, the report of Yonghui Supermarket for the second half of 2019 shows that the revenue of Yonghui mini store reached 550 million yuan in the first half of this year, and some of its stores have achieved profit.
Anyway, the stores and the main players in fresh retail have made a nearly identical judgment: Small shops and small businesses are their next expansion tools. This year will also be a year of rapid expansion of stores.
The result of the expansion is another benefit of opening a small store: it can fill the gaps in the stores.
Where to go in big stores
In the past two years, two companies who came to the store to buy food in Hefei are gaining popularity—the legendary freshness and the freshness of Yipin. And the way to sum up the success of community stores such as Fresh Legend is “near” and “remove complicated and simple”.
In the first place, they opened the store to a sinking market, the neighborhood door to the user, which is exactly where the stores are hard to reach. Second, they put aside the gorgeous decoration and complicated categories, and only sold. Food, selling fresh food, providing cost-effective products, and standardizing a large number of replicated stores.
Today, when home has become just needed, the store companies have stood out. This has forced the stores to rethink the issue of selling vegetables. It is still necessary to open the store to the sinking market and reach the doorstep of the user. . To put it bluntly, All mini shops have similar expectations given to them: they complement vacancies in hypermarkets in terms of location and user reach.
In the mouth of Li Guo, president of Yonghui Supermarket, Yonghui’s development of the mini format is throughComplementing the blank market has driven its performance growth. The mini store can not only fill the blank layout for Yonghui in the region and scene, but also form synergy and linkage in the supply chain and operation. “The development of the mini format is mainly to complement the format of the big store. Yonghui mini format and the entrepreneurial community fresh food store’s positioning and service users’ original intentions tend to be the same. The competition is the strength of the supply chain and the refined operation capability. “Li Guo said.
Similarly, the mission of Hema mini is to lay out the so-called sinking market, and based on the daily needs and ready-to-fit scenarios of community life.
Due to its initial positioning, it ’s not easy for Hema Fresh, which focuses on fierce seafood, to go down. In theory, Hema mini can help Hema, which is located in the city center and has a relatively high unit price. Relatively sunk areas outside Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities like Hangzhou, Hangzhou, and suburbs far from the CBD and bustling shopping malls. The third Hema mini store opened on August 30 was the first time that Hema mini opened its store to the suburbs.
Therefore, Hema mini’s position is even equal to that of the big shop in terms of strategic position.
Finally, when they can open the store to the doorstep of more consumers, what happens after that?
Go to the store, go home and bloom
In 2020, when local retail started to accelerate its expansion plan, the sudden epidemic disrupted all plans. When everyone is doing their best to solve the problem of “cash flow”, the stores seem to have a lot of freedom because they provide people with daily necessities. However, the chaos in the supply chain and the distribution of “home” during the epidemic period is enough to allow them to think more deeply-
Do you need to move faster online? What else can I do in the home scene? How can we ensure a steady pace in such a black swan?
Hema fought a pretty battle in the epidemic, but overwhelming capacity has become a shortcoming that drags down the user experience. Hou Yi said not to lead the warehouse, began to speed up the opening of mini shops.
This may be understood as, Part of the concept of front warehouse is being transferred to these mini stores. Those players who do n’t trust the front warehouse have found another kind of trust about “front”: All mini stores will bear the responsibility of “home” in the future.
Hema now, goalThis is to deeply cultivate the community to serve at home. According to the report of Retailing Planet , in order to achieve the blueprint for home, the box Ma is already in the pilot community group purchase: All Hema offline stores will be equipped with WeChat “box powder group”. Consumers fight for orders in this group, and Hema staff will collect them before 11pm that night, and deliver the next day. . Some stores have independent or shared pick-up points in the community. There is also unconfirmed news that Hema also plans to launch a new community group ordering system, order directly online and deliver to the community.
Communities with a radius of 1.5 to 3 kilometers are a natural home scene. In addition to the front warehouse, the mini that can flexibly choose products and venues, and precisely target objects and needs, seems to be the most suitable solution.
It’s the same for Yonghui. Li Guo said to Tiger Sniff: “How to organically integrate the mini format and home business is the focus of our consideration.” He has proposed that in the future Yonghui will become a “supermarket on mobile phones”, and the supermarket on mobile phones is a fresh market The 3.0 version is exactly the home business.
“It mainly solves the customer’s time cost and meets the needs of different customers. For the current home and other services, there is still a phenomenon of burning money and a large area of loss. Our mini store can be developed only 500 meters from the user. The self-collection model of community group purchases is not only a place for customers to shop and consume, but also a delivery place for customers after online consumption. For example, our recent group gift box pushed by the group purchaser has attracted more than 20,000 customers. Online payment, offline delivery consumer experience. “Li Guo said.
The mainstream view in the industry believes that fresh produce will become a battle for retail. Today, Yonghui already regards home business as its online business as the support for its future business growth.
Stores that are as big as Yonghui have supply chain barriers that new players can’t match. This is the guarantee and endorsement of mini stores. But it is also because of the “big” and “heavy” of large commercial supermarkets, that being home is not an easy task for them.
From the slogan shouted by the fresh produce and home companies, people are increasingly demanding for effective delivery. “Half an hour” has become the standard slogan, but from the perspective of the real ordering experience right now, Half an hour is actually just a kind of vision. At this time, those supermarkets that have fallen into fresh homes are desperately in need of expansion of mini stores.
MaybeIn the future, the value of the hypermarket will become a large regional “warehouse” as a supply of mini stores scattered in the community, but this depends on whether the mini stores can really run through, form a climate, and whether they will soon The mini store that arrived was defeated prematurely.
In short, under the pressure of transformation and competition, all members of the store have shouted “mini store really fragrant”. Next, who will release the profit signal first? The results are yet to be announced, but it is certain that catering to the change that has become smaller has become a top priority for stores.