Under the severe situation of repeated and multi-point distribution of the epidemic in China, almost all retail enterprises are facing pressure from the supply chain level, and consumers are increasingly feeling the huge impact of logistics slowdown and business shutdown on their lives. According to the Bain report, sales of various offline channels have shown a downward trend in 2021, and only convenience stores have maintained their original level.
Recently, however, the convenience bee has reported the news of the closure of stores and layoffs. In this regard, the convenience bee has responded that according to the epidemic situation, the business rhythm and personnel structure will be adjusted. Facilitating the normal development of the bee's business, internal consultation and optimization are continuing to recruit, and the total number of personnel is expected to rise after adjustment.
However, according to a number of former convenience bee employees, this claim does not seem to be credible. In recent months, convenience bees have carried out three rounds of layoffs, and most of the employees have not received N+1 compensation stipulated by law; in addition, some convenience bee employees have broken the news in the pulse that the company canceled the year-end bonus in 2021 because "due to the epidemic, the company's performance has not met expectations."
The convenience bee, which has been running wildly for 6 years and was exposed to be ready to go public last year, seems to have encountered unprecedented problems. What happened to the convenience bee?
Convenience Bee: Centered on "algorithms"
The founder of the convenience bee is The former CEO of Qunar Network Zhuang Chenchao, when he left Qunar Network, his net worth has reached billions, and then created Zebra Capital, according to Zhuang Chenchao's 17-year interview with Titanium Media, Zebra Capital wanted to do holding capital at the beginning of its establishment, and Zebra fully controlled the Convenience Bee at the beginning. Therefore, the convenience bee was a rookie with two sharp swords of technology and capital at that time, and it is not difficult to understand its momentum of "attacking the city" in the early days of its establishment.
On February 14, 2017, Convenience Bee opened its first five stores in Zhongguancun, Beijing. By the end of 2020, it had opened 2,000 stores. According to data from the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, the three major Japanese convenience store giants 7-11, FamilyMart and Lawson have opened 2,000 stores in China, which took 15, 16 and 23 years respectively, and the convenience bee only took 3 years. Convenience Bee adopts a fully direct operation model, which is also the most expensive operating model.
This also means that if you just blindly expand your store, convenience bees are likely to face the risk of capital breakage, after all, there are too many such examples in the industry. 2018 is a disaster year for the convenience store industry, in August, the neighboring convenience store was exposed to a broken capital chain, and 168 stores were all closed overnight; in the same year, 131 convenience stores closed. In this regard, Zhuang Chenchao made an important move to rewrite the fate of the convenience bee: the basic ERP system of the convenience bee was switched to an algorithm-driven automated operation process, which greatly improved human efficiency.
Xue Enyuan, executive director of convenience bee, said in an interview with the media, "We believe that every node with people will lead to a decline in overall efficiency. What is now visible to the naked eye is that Beijing convenience bee stores have generally adopted unmanned cashier checkout, which is just a microcosm of the "less people" of the store.
In the Zhihu Q&A, the official account of the convenience bee fully described the difference between itself and other Japanese convenience stores: "The general convenience store is selected through the experience of the store manager, and the convenience bee captures the consumption data of local consumers on the relevant e-commerce platform, the review data on various social platforms, and the past sales data of other stores... Put in the formula, calculate the earnings, rank, and then pick it out. ”
In terms of display, "where different goods are placed, general convenience stores have their rules and experience, we are through the sales performance of various goods, in other similar types of stores placement and performance ... Set the algorithm, determined. ”
Some media have mentioned such a detail, convenience bee once conducted an experiment, let ten experienced 7-eleven store managers reduce the SKU of a store by 10%, and the next day found that store sales decreased by 5%. The system also did this test, and the next day the store sales decreased by only 0.7%.
Can the convenience bee's algorithm work? That's everyone's question. According to reports, all the cities that the convenience bee entered in 2017 and 2018 achieved overall profitability. From the perspective of the development of the convenience store industry, the profitability of convenience bees has "subverted" the cognition of the industry - whether it is Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, which are already profitable cities, the convenience bees have entered later than Japanese competitors such as 7-11, Lawson, and FamilyMart, but they have achieved profitability in advance. How much of a role the algorithm plays in this is debatable, but it does keep the convenience bee caught up in the whirlpool of public opinion again and again. This is described below.
The convenience store industry accelerates the internal roll
According to the statistics of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, if the convenience bee can achieve the Ten Thousand Stores Plan in 2023, it is expected to rank among the top 5 in the industry. At present, in terms of store size, EasyJet, Meiyijia and Kunlun Hospitality are industry leaders, and they are not benchmarks for the rapidly expanding convenience bees, because they do not constitute a positive competitive relationship in terms of geographical layout, consumer groups and business models. Convenience Bee currently needs to benchmark the japanese three giants--- 711, FamilyMart, and Rosen. Jingdong once also wanted to enter this field and released the "five-year million store" rhetoric, but since the end of last year, the Internet industry layoffs were frequently rumored, and Jingdong's Jingxi Business Department was a hard hit area, so for the convenience bee, the pressure from cross-border competition in the Internet industry can be temporarily ignored.
Why is it said that the "Japanese Big Three" are the frontal competitors of the convenience bee? From the perspective of regional layout, the "Japanese-funded big three" and convenience bees are mainly first- and second-tier cities, and their target customers are urban white-collar workers and students. However, the big three have been rooted in first-tier cities for more than ten years, and have basically penetrated into every joint in first- and second-tier cities; while the convenience bee has only developed for five years, and for the former, it is a late invader. However, most urban white-collar workers, convenience stores have been integrated into all aspects of their lives--- from three meals to snacks to daily chemicals, migration costs and difficulties can be seen, not to mention that the three giants of Japanese capital are also studying the tastes of young people in real time, and constantly launch their own products, including cooked food, to seize the stomach of young people.
In the first and second-tier cities and the big three hard gang is obviously not a long-term solution, convenience bees also realized that they should sink the market force, in the three big three weak points to gain a first-mover advantage. As the dispute between convenience stores in first- and second-tier cities has become white-hot and the market has gradually become saturated, convenience bees have begun to move south, and the three giants have also chosen to expand to the sinking market in central and southwest China.
Where is the strength of the convenience bee and the "Big Three" head-on confrontation? On the one hand, compared with the three giants, convenience bees, as a local brand, have no troubles in terms of brand authorization and other aspects, and have no worries. According to industry insiders, the whole family was once deeply troubled by brand licensing problems, and in June 2021 Chinese mainland, lin Jianhong, CEO of the whole family, left the company, which had a certain impact on the expansion of the family in the Chinese market; followed by the algorithm system of the convenience bee, which at least helped the convenience bee to quickly pass through the "small transparency" stage and form a scale competition in the early stage.
However, for now, convenience bees need to be considered in at least two aspects, on the one hand, the brand value among young people. In the expansion of the sinking market, we seem to be easy to see the scene of the explosion of the three Japanese-funded giant stores on the social platform, since last year, the 7-11 Xiamen first store, the first store in Jinan, and the first store in Shijiazhuang have opened one after another, which has induced a queue boom among local citizens. Open the Little Red Book, search for convenience stores, and in the local convenience store promotion information stream, there are faintly interspersed with tweets from the Japanese-funded big three, while the convenience bee has no name.
On the other hand, the algorithm is also a knife for the convenience bee to stab at itself, and last year, the Southern Weekend article "Quietly Shooting Pedestrians, Algorithm Commanding Employees: Whether the "System" of the Convenience Bee Crossed the Line" pointed the spearhead directly at the convenience bee algorithm system. Since 2017, for up to five years, convenience bees have recruited a large number of information collectors to quietly place cameras in residential buildings, office buildings, and even the doorways of state organs in many cities, fully capturing everyone who enters and exits that day. Near each target store of convenience bees, it is a key monitoring area. The convenience bee background has accumulated at least hundreds of thousands of shooting data.
At the same time, according to the investigation of Southern Weekend reporters, in order to avoid legal disputes, the pre-job training of these information collectors includes a series of "words" to deal with police investigations. As for whether it is suspected of secretly filming and the source of data collection, in that year, the convenience bee side replied in writing to the Southern Weekend reporter, denying the "secret shooting" behavior, and there were no national laws and regulations that year, only Beijing, Henan Province, Liaoning Province, Guangzhou City, Chongqing Municipality and other provinces and cities issued relevant local management regulations. However, in November last year, the Personal Information Protection Law came into effect, which stipulates that no organization or individual may illegally collect, use, process or transfer the personal information of others. Therefore, whether the data sources that underpin the convenient bee algorithm system constitute an invasion of personal privacy, should there be new arguments now?
Convenience Bee "Conjecture"
The pandemic is both a disaster and a test. For convenience bees, the pandemic has forced them to slow down the pace of expansion, so as to seek fine operations inward and think about new growth points in addition to scale effects.
First of all, although the convenience bee has achieved profitability, the overall situation is still in the "burning money" stage and needs capital to return to blood. Many industry insiders speculated that the situation of a large number of layoffs and stores closed by the convenience bee this time may be related to the break of the capital chain. The direct operation model of convenience bees is heavy investment and the risk cannot be passed on. In addition, because the convenience bee emphasizes "digital management", its cost is higher than that of peers, amortization is more difficult, which includes hardware costs, convenience bee stores will be equipped with a computer, Pad, install a camera that supports 360 degree rotation, each employee will also be equipped with a mobile phone for daily operation; there is also software cost, convenience bee relative to other convenience store systems, in the research and development of the system is also more expensive. Therefore, for the convenience bee to expand on a large scale, it needs stronger capital support. According to Tianyan, the last round of public financing of convenience bees was still in May 2020. Can a convenient bee that relies solely on zebra blood transfusions survive the pandemic?
According to the data, as of the beginning of last year, the proportion of private label SKUs of domestic convenience store chains was less than 5% on average, and they were basically concentrated in cooked foods, such as 7-11 signboard oden and udon noodles. Convenience bees also continue to launch their own brands, such as last year's launch of specialty coffee "Sleepless Sea", Sleepless Sea mainly includes 12-20 yuan of specialty coffee and an average price of 15 yuan of new tea, when the business has just started, convenience parties invest a lot of energy to promote, a big fight "subsidy war". However, according to the "narrow door" data, the peak of the sleepless sea opened to 610, and recently, only 300 stores were displayed, almost waist chopped. Therefore, how to build a private brand to form a new business growth point is also a problem that convenience bees should think about.
Will convenience bees change the game for the entire industry in the future? Opinions vary in the industry. Convenience bee itself sees this matter this way, "We hope to become a big refrigerator in the life scene of ordinary people, from the door to the office door, we hope that density can increase the frequency and increase loyalty." From this perspective, you can understand that convenience bees are hoping to become a high-density infrastructure. Xue Enyuan said.
This is similar to Amazon's "flywheel effect", in 1999, Bezos said to improve from the perspective of infrastructure, he began to realize that the biggest opportunity in the field of technology must be platform-driven, when you build everything in a rapidly developing, rapidly modernizing infrastructure, your dividends are not only from your own growth, but also from the infrastructure itself. Driven by this goal, Amazon has become the nation's number one e-commerce company, and what kind of answer will the convenience bee deliver?