Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly Liu Xueer
Editor / Chen Fang
If Beijing is the "desert" of convenience stores, then the Beijing subway is the "sand dune" in the desert.
In this megacity of more than 20 million people, the subway has become the most efficient travel artery, with 27 lines setting up 783 kilometers of flow, transporting tens of millions of passengers every day. But in the past 17 years, there has never been any germ of commercial civilization related to convenience stores in Beijing subway stations. The amenities that urbanites need most seem to be disappearing here.
The turnaround occurred in July 2021, when three convenience stores were put into trial operation on the Beijing subway. Five months later, in December, the number of convenience facilities including convenience stores, pharmacies, and bookstores increased to 130, covering 10 subway lines, of which convenience store brands mainly include Kyo Light, D+, Lawson, and Duodian.
A consumer sighed: "In 17 years, there are finally convenience stores in the Beijing subway, which is a landmark event. ”
(Wangjing Station multi-point convenience store, photo by Liu Xueer)
Four subway convenience stores won the game
The ice-breaking journey of Beijing subway convenience stores began in July 2021, when Jingdong convenience stores, D+ convenience stores, and Lawson convenience stores each opened a pilot, and the breakthrough battle of Beijing subway convenience stores began.
The focus of these three brands is different, the Japanese Lawson convenience store is the most mature, in terms of goods more in line with the needs of young people for fresh food goods; Jingdong convenience store in the unmanned container, adding old clothes recycling, printing and maintenance and other special services; D+ convenience store is the national supply and marketing agency specially developed for the Beijing subway new brand, is still growing.
(East Fourth Station Lawson Convenience Store, photographed by Liu Xueer)
Xiang Hai, a core person close to the bidding, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly, "Although the public opinion survey of the subway company shows that passengers have a great demand for convenience facilities such as convenience stores, the subway is still not at ease after the store pilot in July, and after a month of intensive public opinion monitoring, it was found that everyone reflected it was really good, plus the pilot store sales were OK, and there was no phenomenon of customers eating and drinking on the subway, which gave them confidence and officially started the bidding process in August." ”
"Before the official bidding, I saw that there were policy openings, plus several pilots that sold well, and convenience store brands such as 7-ELEVEn, Convenience Bee, and Good Neighbor came to consult." Revealed to the sea. But these promising convenience store brands were quickly poured cold water, and not many brands eventually participated in the bidding.
The reason is that the subway company has made strict restrictions on the convenience stores that can enter the Beijing subway. To put it simply, in addition to having a well-known and chain background in Beijing, there are also hard requirements for some indicators. Xiang Hai revealed: "Specific to the size of the store, registered capital, assets, profitability, and the number of employees, there are requirements. ”
Industry insiders analyze that the Beijing subway has its own considerations for doing so, the brand chosen must be a big brand, and it can also be operated for a long time with strength, and it cannot pick and choose when encountering difficulties, so the impact will be bad. According to this set of strict criteria screening, some brands have been brushed off.
"Convenience bees did not participate in consideration of their own reasons; the 7-ELEVEn epidemic has been expanding in the Beijing market in the past two years, and some stores will make store adjustments if they cannot reach the assessed level of Japanese businessmen; Jingdong convenience stores will abandon bids after participating in bidding." Yuanfeng, another core person close to the tender, told Caijing Weekly. Xiang Haize revealed that the convenience bee did not meet the standard due to losses.
The good neighbor convenience store based on the Beijing market is also very embarrassed, "the good neighbor is shrinking, the funds are relatively tight, and the subway convenience store tender also has at least 10 stores, the investment is not small, this is not its strategic focus." Xiang Hai added that good neighbors have been testing fresh food, staple food kitchens and other businesses in recent years, and they are more cautious in opening stores.
According to China Business Daily, the current monthly rent of Beijing metro convenience stores is 4,000 to 5,000 yuan per square meter, and most of the area is 20 to 30 square meters. According to this calculation, the rent of opening a store alone will cost 80,000 to 150,000 yuan per month, the rental cost of a year will need 96 to 1.8 million yuan, and opening ten stores will mean tens of millions of yuan of investment.
Surprisingly, the whole family did not participate. In fact, as early as 2015, FamilyMart and CR Vanguard won the bid for the operation license of the Beijing Subway convenience store, but they were forced to delay the opening of the business due to policy reasons.
Yuanfeng found that the most brilliant period of the family in the Beijing market was in 2017 and 2018, "the commodity structure once exceeded 7-ELEVEn, but the pace of commodity change after 2019 seems to have slowed down." Xiang Hai believes that the most troublesome thing for the whole family is that the brand licensing problem has not been resolved, "and the concession between Japan and Japan has not been settled, which will affect the expansion of new regions." In addition, the departure of Lin Jianhong, the CEO of the Chinese mainland family in June 2021, is also regarded as a bad signal by the outside world.
In the end, only four convenience store brands stood out - Lawson, Duodian, Jingqing, and D+. Among them, Jingli is a convenience store under the state-owned enterprise Yiqing Group, which will sell the "Centennial Yili" brand under the parent company, such as Yili fruit bread, vitamin bread, wafer biscuits, Arctic Ocean soda, etc. familiar to old Beijingers.
Led by Wang Lei, the former general manager of the neighbor convenience store, the convenience store brand incubated by Wumart, after experiencing the adventurous expansion in 2018 and 2019, it turned from profit to loss, and began to shrink after July 2020, and now there are more than 200 stores. People close to many points revealed that "the direction of Wumart to do convenience stores is not as clear as hypermarkets and life supermarkets." ”
Rosen began to accelerate its expansion in 2016, and the statistics of the China Chain Store and Franchise Association as of the end of 2020 show that Rosen ranked fifth Chinese mainland convenience stores with 3256 stores, of which 549 were added in 2020, surpassing 111 for FamilyMart and 240 for 7-ELEVEn.
According to Yuanfeng observation from Rosen competitors, "Lawson benchmarked 7-ELEVEn, which has been more closely integrated with the actual situation in Various parts of China in recent years, so the development speed is faster than that of 7-ELEVEn." Lawson does its own brand building and commodity power construction, and hands over the business circle research and store site selection to the Chinese side of the joint venture, and is more resolute in the choice of partners, and the two sides of the joint venture play a strong point. ”
It is understood that by the end of 2021, in the Beijing subway stores, Beijing Light Convenience Store has opened 36, Rosen 36, multi-point 17, D+ no public information, a clerk revealed that more than 40 have been opened.
It is worth mentioning that Yuanfeng also revealed that the Jingdong convenience store that missed the first train caught up with the winning bid of the second batch of subway convenience stores and is expected to open in the next year. The Beijing-Hong Kong Metro also said at the end of December 2021 that it will cooperate with JD.com in the future to open subway convenience stores in some stations under the jurisdiction of the Beijing-Hong Kong Metro.
It's not easy to operate
These Beijing subway convenience stores that have been opened have made the people of the city feel the convenience and efficiency of the metropolis.
At the Lawson convenience store in Dongsi Subway Station, 12 one-person tall shelves surround a narrow U-shaped corridor, and the small area of the store except for a very small number of daily necessities, basically snacks and drinks, of which there are 4 refrigerated shelves, filled with Rosen's self-developed ice skin moon cake, bento, rice balls, sandwiches and other fresh foods. At 3 p.m. on December 31, 2021, four or five young people lined up to buy small cakes and bread, and in addition to manual cashiers, they could also choose machine cashiers.
(Subway convenience store shelves, photographed by Liu Xueer)
The D+ convenience store at Qingnian Road subway station is more spacious, with three rows of shelves in 20 or 30 square meters, in addition to daily snacks, there are also snail powder, unified soup people and other fast food semi-finished products, but there are very few types of fresh food, only sandwiches, rice balls, bread and chicken breast. There is also a coffee machine behind the cash register, and the female clerk revealed that this convenience store has become a place for Internet celebrities to punch cards, and will follow up with hot coffee drinks, small bowl noodles and other foods suitable for office workers.
The multi-point convenience store at Wangjing Subway Station also has a slight feature, about 10 square meters, covering fresh food, cold drinks, ordinary fast-moving snacks and so on. The difference is that its home has a special hot drink shelf, in addition to more daily necessities than the other two brands, in addition to masks, sanitary napkins, lipsticks, band-aids and so on.
Of course, it is not easy for these convenience stores to actually operate. Due to the small size of the subway store, the opening hours are limited, and various adjustments have to be submitted for approval layer by layer, and there are many restrictions in the selection of products, logistics and distribution, promotion operations and so on.
From the selection point of view, because the regulations can not exceed 30 square meters, the basic subway store area is concentrated between 10-30 square meters, SKU is sharply compressed, such as Lawson's subway store SKU is only three or four hundred, or five or six hundred, while the ground store is generally 1500-2500.
The main thing is that many high-margin fresh foods cannot be sold, because there is no water supply and sewage, and all subway convenience stores cannot provide oden, buns and other foods that need to be heated on site.
In addition, due to the low amount of electricity underground, it is impossible to set up more temperature control cabinets, so high-margin fresh foods such as bento and sandwiches with high storage requirements must also be compressed. Che Wenhuan, deputy general manager of Beijing Lawson, revealed that the temperature control cabinet mainly preserves Lawson's own brand goods, which are calculated to find that although there are not many SKUs, the sales contribution has reached 75%, so there is a reason why the current performance of subway convenience stores is not going up.
Logistics distribution is also a major problem. Many new convenience stores will set up 24 hours, one of the purposes is to facilitate night delivery, generally from 10 pm to 2 am the next day, so as to ensure that the logistics vehicle can leave the fifth ring road of Beijing before 7 am.
However, subway stores must cooperate with subway operation hours, and the three stores visited by Caijing Tianxia Weekly are open from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Subway replenishment should avoid the morning and evening rush hours, but also control costs.
(Qingnian Road Station D+ convenience store, photo by Liu Xueer)
Each family's solution is also different. For example, Rosen will cooperate with the nearest ground store, when the delivery is finished at two or three o'clock in the morning, and then wait until the subway station opens at four or five o'clock to send it in, so that there is no need to run a special trip to raise the cost. Beijing Light Convenience Store chooses to deliver from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. before the peak of the flow of people.
In addition to commodity and logistics problems, there are also troubles in promotional operations. Che Wenhuan summed up the latest promotion of the Lawson subway store, "the effect is particularly bad", first, because there is no promotional material publicity, customers do not know that there is a promotion in the store; second, the subway customers are not sensitive to the price, they are mostly to solve the breakfast and dinner and other just needs, the bread price of 9 yuan or 9.8 yuan, the impact on its purchase decision is not large.
Whether the subway can do publicity, put promotional labels, whether to file for the record, convenience store brands are also groping. Che Wenhuan wants to increase the intuitive material information as much as possible, and use the public number to push, or the united subway station to push promotional information.
Can it be an urban oasis?
What many people don't know is that the Beijing subway in the long river of history once had a bustling city business.
As early as the 1990s, passengers could buy hamburgers, hams, sandwiches, newspapers, and even clothes, cosmetics, bags, videotapes, etc. on the subway. By 2003, Wumart convenience stores were also opening 21 stores in the Beijing subway, concentrated in popular areas of Line 1 and Line 2.
That all changed in 2004. In this year, Beijing issued the "Beijing Urban Rail Transit Safety Operation Management Measures", which stipulates that commercial stalls are prohibited in places including subway stations, platforms, and evacuation channels, and convenience stores have disappeared in Beijing since then. Yuan Qing, a person close to the early Wumart convenience store, revealed that the government stopped the subway convenience store for safety reasons, and in 2004, Wumart's convenience stores in the subway were all closed.
The special role of the city determines the importance of security factors. But as time went on, the time to reopen convenience stores in the Beijing subway also matured.
In fact, the policy of Beijing subway convenience stores has been loosened as early as a few years ago, and in 2018, the notice jointly issued by seven departments in Beijing emphasized the need to open convenience stores into the subway, and also shouted out a specific target - 6,000 stores in three years. The following year, the Beijing subway issued a document, this time to only allow new subway stations to enter convenience stores.
However, until 2021, there will be substantial progress in the convenience stores in the Beijing subway, although there is still a certain gap compared with the target, but the action of opening 130 stores a year is considered to be fast, will the Beijing subway convenience stores become urban "oasis" in the future?
Wang Hongtao, executive deputy secretary general of the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that the Beijing subway business has not developed before, there are reasons for urban positioning and subway positioning, beijing subway positioning in previous years is mainly to solve traffic problems, less consideration for commercial planning, no suitable outlets to release. "Nowadays, Beijing has opened a lot of lines, and commercial factors will be considered in planning, and it is also building consumer cities to expand domestic demand through double circulation, which is a matter of course."
(Subway convenience store hot and cold drink shelves, liu Xueer photo)
The opening of 2021 is also expected in Che Wenhuan's view. He found that in 2018, the Ministry of Commerce issued 18 new policies for the development of convenience stores, proposing that new communities need to be equipped with convenient facilities, etc.; in 2019, the Ministry of Commerce issued a convenience policy, and in 2020, it was upgraded to the State Council to introduce policies. "It's just that the process is too long."
Judging from the current operation, Che Wenhuan admitted that "it was slightly worse than expected", although the efficiency of the subway store was higher than the ground, but the overall sales of each store did not meet expectations. Of course, the vast majority of subway convenience stores have been open for less than a month, which seems understandable.
In the face of speculation about the high rent, Che Wenhuan responded that the rent given by the Beijing subway is OK, but there are more exports, and the store cannot eat everyone, even if it is blocked by security equipment, it may affect the business. "It's still a bit difficult to achieve the expected sales."
At present, they pay more attention to the publicity effect brought by subway stores, especially the Beijing subway will welcome people from all over the country, "which has a good publicity effect for Lawson's future development of markets across the country." ”
At present, the development of convenience stores in Beijing is indeed lagging behind the development of the city. According to the "2021 China City Convenience Store Index" released by the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, the number of convenience stores in Beijing ranked 11th, lower than that of Zhengzhou and Tianjin in the north, which was 1/3 of Shanghai; and in terms of the number of people served by each convenience store, Beijing ranked 29th with 9199 people/store, and Shanghai ranked 10th with 3856 people/stores.
As for whether the 130 Beijing subway convenience stores can be increased after opening, many interviewees said it is still unknown. One interviewee said, "It's still groping, but 130 is really not too much." Judging from the 459 stations of the Beijing subway as of December 2021, there are also thousands of increments set up by 3 stores at one station, which may lead to an "oasis" for the "convenience store desert".
(At the request of the interviewees, Xiang Hai, Yuan Feng, and Yuan Qing are pseudonyms)
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