The past five years have been years in which the supply chain of fitness professionals has been out of control.
Looking at business with opinions, super opinions, from the frontier observation of new business practitioners.
Text | Lewis (General Manager of China Sports Data, Co-founder of Guangzhu Pen Fitness)
Special Observer Lewis in this issue
While everyone enjoys the longest May Day holiday in 12 years, the live broadcast and the goods are too busy to open. Even CCTV Boys fights for live streaming.
Live streaming has been hot recently, from Weiya and Li Jiaqi, who created sales miracles, to Luo Yonghao, who livestreamed to pay off debts, to various corporate bosses such as Ctrip Liang Jianzhang and Gree Dong Mingzhu, who sold goods off the scene.
Feeling sentimentally, I posted a message in the circle of friends:
“While selling live products improves efficiency, it also deprives many people of job opportunities and allows wealth to be concentrated more quickly in the hands of a few people. The vast majority of people in the society are not direct beneficiaries. In fact, it will Eliminating a lot of jobs will also make many very good products disappear due to lack of proficiency in new communication channels. I support the innovation brought about by technological progress, but I still ca n’t help but ask, what about the people who have been eliminated from the job? If you say they deserve it, it ’s too ruthless.
I did not deny the benefits of live broadcasting, such as helping the products in the deep forest and old forests to go to the world, creative people get more labor rewards, I asked some people what they can do after online shopping and live broadcasting disappear. ?
Almost everyone is a little worried when they praise the live broadcast for creating the future and achieving personal value.
Everyone who knows me knows that what I hate most is trafficking anxiety, but as the epidemic changes and response strategies are adjusted, I think it ’s time to talk about something.
Two forced changes
I think of two things.
First, the difficulty of re-employment of laid-off workers of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, and second, the huge impact of online shopping and the rise of mobile Internet on offline physical stores after 2010.
To sum up its characteristics, the laid-off of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s was of a cliff-style, broken-arm, and brutal. The impact of the Internet on physical stores is slow, gradual, and blood drawing.
Let ’s first take a look at this Internet shock physical store that is closer to us. This memory is still relatively fresh. I was still in Guangdong in 2009. At that time, I was doing retail sales of consumer goods. I often went to the store to check the terminal, pay attention to the promotion team, and stayed close to the market. Later, someone vaguely heard that there is a network platform called JD.com, and all digital products and even home appliances will be sold online in the future.
At that time, the feeling of the vast majority of our colleagues at that time was, how is it possible, whoever buys online knows the quality, let alone online transactions are not safe. I won’t go into details about what happened later. Most people have a deep understanding. We have all witnessed how the Internet has subverted the traditional retail system a little bit.
But this change is not “dramatic”. The impact on the employees of the physical store is relatively gentle, giving everyone enough time to think about the transformation, and even the physical store has been booming for some time. Because it contains two special reasons:
One is technologyThe realization of the is gradual, from the payment method to the consumer’s adaptation to the new payment method, from the PC side to the mobile Internet side, from the backward logistics upgrade to the current strong logistics system, all of which require a little time to build.
Secondly, the process of technology replacement is also accompanied by rapid urbanization in China and rapid growth of residents ’income. For example, new stores in new urban areas are established, and old product lines are phased out and updated. These have stimulated the development of the real economy. So even if there is an Internet impact on physical store operations, the life of practitioners is not so uncomfortable.
Of course, macroscopically, there are a large number of people in the entire society who have benefited from this change, but there are also many people who are lost.
Some practitioners have changed their careers to other emerging industry markets. They have learned from scratch and their age and energy are slightly inferior to those of young people. There are also some practitioners whose income has dropped significantly, but because they have no other skills, they can only tolerate a declining quality of life. In short, life is not easy, and almost everyone always has anxiety about the future hidden in his mind.
Cruel memories of the 1990s
Let ’s take a look at the relatively laid-off work of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s.
Many post-95 practitioners do n’t know much about the first major change. At that time, I was still small, and I still have a lot of deficiencies in the ability to see the world, but I am clear I remember the depression scene I saw in the northeast town. Regarding this part, interested friends can search for related documentaries and various documentary literature on the Internet. There is a movie “Blizzard is Coming”. If you are interested, you can look at it. The scene is very realistic, and there is a novel collection “Winter Swimming” 》 You can also feel it.
Some social Darwinists say with a big heart, “Who makes these workers not improve their own abilities?”, “If the locals can’t mix up and leave, who can make you disappointed?”, “I think it’s my own problem” . This kind of remark is similar to one of the replies below the circle of friends I wrote at the beginning of the article: the survival of the fittest is for everyone, and everyone who ca n’t keep up with the situation deserves it.
Full of ignorance and ruthlessness.
Ignorance is ignorance of the environment of the times. Ruthlessness is ruthlessness that overestimates oneself and scorns others.
The impact of that reform on most SOE workers was breakingCliff-like, broken wrist, tragic.
Similarly, I think that the long-standing crisis in the fitness industry triggered by this epidemic is more like “big layoffs in the 1990s” compared to the previous two industrial changes. They all ignore, avoid, talk, pass, and pass. When the crisis really appears, everyone behaves as if it were sudden and shocking. The elephant in the room suddenly appeared, Elephant in the room.
The “elephant” that has always existed
Everyone knows that elephants have been in the room, but few people have adjusted and changed in the past ten years, so the fitness industry is forced by the combined effects of external and internal factors changes happened. (Click here for the article “ 20 years of upheaval in the fitness industry: 4 keys to life and death 》)
The first to be affected is fitness venues. We all know that the high cost, high debt, and high competition that venue operations have carried in recent years have already caused the industry to face a crisis, but only because of the number of fitness people in the whole society Growing, let everyone still breathe a sigh of relief, but many venues are actually lingering on.
Assuming that the epidemic has ended successfully, the venue ’s operations will not be immediately restored to the original level, as I wrote an article before . Under the dual pressure of consumers failing to regain the courage to exercise at the venue and store costs, there may be a batch of venue closures after June.
The decline in the number of venues directly affects the employment of fitness coaches and memberships.
The past five years have been years in which the supply chain of fitness professionals has been out of control. But the demand for fitness coaches will soon change from the seller ’s market to the buyer ’s market, and the first out of the situation is of course unemployed after the venue collapses Coaches, but they can achieve re-employment by going to other cities for development or working in other venues with higher quality management.
Coaches with low professionalism, low level of cooperation, low willingness to work, and only classes without other coaches will quickly get out. Members who do not have the skills to operate venues will also be quickly eliminated.
The decline in the employment level of coaches will be due to the decrease in the number of coach training schools, and the reduction of school districts will inevitably lead to a decrease in employees.
The training system based on in-service coaches or store managers will also be impacted. The so-called “knowledge pay” will only flourish when the industry is getting better. When the industry’s operating efficiency declines, the number of people willing to pay money and energy for these short-term training will be greatly reduced.
After that, commercial fitness equipment manufacturers will be affected, and the upstream fight will be more intense. Commercial equipment manufacturers are likely to repeat the same mistakes as other industries, from hundreds of competition to only dozens. Behind it is the reduction of its sales network personnel.
SaaS companies will also find that the number of venue renewals plummets. As you have seen before, some SaaS manufacturers have undergone large-scale staff reductions in the first phase of the outbreak.
I will not elaborate more on the above, because in my opinion, behind this short sentence, there are countless individuals and families. pain.
The young man has just held a certificate in exchange for high tuition fees and the company offer is ready to make great efforts in his own field. He suddenly found that the fitness people are still There are fewer venues. It was like the actor was about to go on stage, the theater was ruined, he was stunned, frightened, and helpless.
Compared to the fitness industry, the catering industry will recover relatively quickly. Because of its just-needed attributes, the restaurant will recover quickly, and it is a simple business that pays for everything. The fitness industry is different. As I wrote earlier, the backward model of high investment, high debt, and high competition has always been like the sword of Damocles The same, hanging on the head of each practitioner.
Unemployment of some fitness industry practitioners will be inevitable, and because the overall quality of the industry practitioners is not high, the transition will encounter difficulties. This is just like the state-owned enterprise workers who were laid off in the 1990s. They have technology, but There is no place to display your own technology. In the face of major adjustments and shocks in the industry, they are defenseless.
This is the first real professional crisis that Chinese fitness people may soon face.
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