Warehouse stores: Yonghui, Hualian and northland supermarket have completed localization attempts. Will you become a member?

In northland supermarket, traditional supermarkets are constantly exploring new business models.

On July 30th, the first storage supermarket in northland supermarket, the leader of Hebei Shangchao, officially opened in Shijiazhuang, and the store made innovations in many aspects, such as furnishings, product positioning and business philosophy.

Since 20021,faced with the diversion impact of online e-commerce and community group buying, traditional supermarkets have been under heavy pressure.

In order to seek new growth points, various supermarket enterprises, such as Yonghui Supermarket, have recently borrowed from overseas retail experience and tried new formats such as warehouse stores and warehouse member stores.

Warehousing member stores mainly involve the combination of warehousing system and member consumption system (hereinafter referred to as "member system").

Warehouse has become a common form of overseas retail, especially home improvement retail, such as Lowe's in the United States and IKEA in Switzerland. The most basic feature is to integrate the sales area and the storage area, and directly stack the goods on high storage shelves for sale.

Membership is also very common, such as Walgreens Plus, an American chain drug store brand. The basic feature of this system is that only paying members can enjoy services and consumption.

At present, in the retail market of China, Costco, Sam member store and Box Horse X member store belong to the combination of two elements, while Yonghui warehouse store and Northland warehouse supermarket prefer the pure warehouse system, and pure membership supermarket is rare in China.

The essence of membership system is to choose customers, provide specific goods and services, and conduct dislocation competition different from mass retail. Among the three elements of retail "people and goods yard", membership system mainly corresponds to "people" and warehousing system mainly corresponds to "field", but they are not independent and often rely on "goods", which involves deep-seated business model reform.

First, let's look at the membership system. Take Costco and Sam's member store in China as an example. They screened out the target customers through the annual fee above 200 yuan-middle-and high-income people who shop many times a month and the unit price of customers exceeds 1000 yuan.

For this customer group, good shopping experience is the main reason for paying the annual fee, so "goods" and "market" should be built around "people", and the core focus is on goods (category, brand, price and form) and additional services.

The emphasis on grasping members' preferences and shopping habits can be summarized as providing members with goods that meet their living habits at more favorable prices and in more suitable forms, and at the same time simplifying the selection process of consumers by choosing SKU.

Additional services help to enrich shopping scenes and enhance shopping experience, which is also the most intuitive feature different from mass retail.

The essence of storage system is to reshape stores, combine stores and warehouses into one, and improve operational efficiency.

The storage system reshapes the pattern of stores, combines the sales area and the storage area into one, effectively expands the actual storage space, improves the space utilization rate, expands the short shelves upwards, and also allows independent warehouses to integrate into the three-dimensional scene of supermarkets.

The deeper improvement is reflected in the operational efficiency:

(1) Reduce the labor demand by mechanization, put the whole box of goods on the shelf by forklift and other mechanical equipment, and the clerk only needs to open the top box, which greatly simplifies the loading process;

(2) The production capacity of the middle and back-end supply chain is forced by the storage expansion of the front-end stores. The increase of single arrival reduces the fault tolerance rate of logistics batches and selected products. The information flow of merchants must be accurate enough to ensure the correctness of goods.

(3) Adapting to large packaged products can speed up inventory turnover, and the higher shelves are suitable for stacking large packaged products, such as potato chips packaged at home, bottled nuts, boxed beer, etc. , which not only meets the needs of users for large packaged products, but also improves the inventory turnover efficiency.

Warehousing membership supermarkets have matured overseas, and excellent enterprises such as Sam have many innovations on the commodity side that are worth learning from.

Overseas, Costco, a giant with sales exceeding 1000 billion dollars, and Sam's member stores with sales of tens of billions dollars were born in warehouse membership supermarkets. Both of them have many innovations on the commodity side that can be used for reference.

Take Sam as an example:

(1) Independent brands effectively enhance customer stickiness. Sam's own brand sales accounted for more than 35%, basically covering all categories, creating a variety of explosive products in fresh, baked and other categories. The underlying logic is to differentiate prices and quality through purchasing scale and global supply chain advantages, and promote them to members through tasting or experience;

(2) Wide category and narrow product model are the core of driving supply chain upgrade. Sam not only provides all kinds of goods in ordinary supermarkets, but also sells all kinds of electronic products, large household appliances, outdoor products and other long-tail products, but the number of SKUs is still controlled at only about 4,000. The key point is to closely follow the preferences of members, reduce the difficulty of consumers' choice by choosing the best among the best, and at the same time, low SKU can also increase the order volume of a single SKU, helping the company gain greater bargaining power at the upstream purchasing end;

(3) Large package is the key to improve the transaction rate, and the low unit price brought by wholesale purchase can effectively stimulate members' shopping desire.

Domestic supermarkets have tried to localize the warehousing system and returned to the initial heart of "cheap supermarkets".

In the first half of 20021,domestic supermarket brands tried to transform traditional stores into warehouses, among which Yonghui warehouse stores were important representatives.

However, due to the limitation of store area (mostly converted from the original hypermarket stores, the area is less than 1 000 square meters, which limits the layout space of member service formats) and positioning (the core of traditional supermarkets is mass retail), Yonghui did not follow the trend of membership, but gave priority to the development of warehousing system and returned to the initial intention of "cheap supermarkets":

(1) Innovating the pattern of stores, combining sales with storage areas;

(2) Streamline SKUs, reducing the number of SKUs in general supermarkets from 1000+ to 4000-6000;

(3) Some products are sold in batches, focusing on people's livelihood flow products with local characteristics;

(4) Increase the proportion of self-owned brand goods, such as fruits and vegetables from Yonghui Farm, rice from interesting fields, snacks from greedy lions, etc.

(5) The prices of some commodities are lower than those of ordinary hypermarkets, so as to achieve "everyday parity and consistency".

In the long run, warehouse (member) supermarket is an important exploration direction for domestic supermarket enterprises to cope with fierce competition in the industry, but the specific effect needs further observation.

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Author: open source securities Huang Zepeng Yang Yan

The original name of the report is: "supermarkets around the world try water stores and actively promote the exploration of new business models."