Why did Costco expose the lies of new retail?

This year's retail circle is a bit like "it's useless to talk about Costco, and it's useless to talk about business models."

Costco opened its first store in Shanghai, and many people applauded it, but not a few people were not optimistic. After some fighting, you will find that there are actually two main routes for retail:

Those who admire Costco can be called "cost-effective" parties, such as Xiaomi and famous products. The founders publicly stated that they were inspired by Costco and regarded Costco as their idols. Ye Guofu, the founder of the famous brand, personally stepped off the stage and easily won100,000 Canadian dollars with "Salute to Costco" written with a fan mentality, which proved that this route has a broad mass base.

There are many specific analyses that are not optimistic about Costco. For example, people in China are used to the convenience of e-commerce and express delivery, but they are not used to this once-a-week car purchase. The current craze is only fresh and unsustainable. ...

But if you look closely at the people who say these words, you will find that they are often another force in the retail circle-the "new retail" faction with the supremacy of scene experience.

Who has a better solution to get customers back to the store?

In fact, whether it is "cost-effective" or "new retail", the essence is the differentiated competition for traditional retail. Compared with traditional hypermarkets, Costco's selected SKUs and extreme prices are reasonable, and the so-called new retail scene display and better shopping experience are perceptible.

The dispute between these two routes is due to the common and urgent problem faced by the relevant retailers: how can we get the lost customers back to the store? (There is also a struggle for discourse power and dominance behind this)

Let's take a look at what solutions are given by "cost performance" and "new retail" respectively.

The core of Costco's business model is to attract people with competitive products and become paid members. The more members, the greater the sales volume of single products, the stronger the negotiation ability of upstream procurement, and the further reduction of prices, forming a virtuous circle.

This model does not look complicated, but it is almost impossible to replicate.

When you have no loyal members and no sales guarantee, what will you use to negotiate and buy? Simply using subsidies to make low prices, the more you sell, the more you earn. Once the subsidy is stopped, the user will pat his ass and leave after collecting the wool.

Being a membership retailer is a bit like doing community and socializing in the Internet field. The reputation of "high cost performance" cannot be achieved in a day or two, especially in China, where the level of goodwill is generally low. Consumers have experienced too many merchants who run away after a wave of market, and many merchants hoard goods at the reserve price without charging membership fees, which makes the threshold for imitating Costco extremely high.

Even though there are countless research articles on the market, Costco has become the most thoroughly analyzed store in the world, but no one has been able to recreate a comparable retail brand for more than 40 years. Even for Wal-Mart, which has a strong supply chain advantage, it is difficult to draw a picture of its Sam member store.

The decoration is really upgraded and the product is pseudo-upgraded.

Looking at the solution of new retail, the logic of new retail is very mysterious. It is necessary to transform the people's freight yard to attract customers with a better shopping experience.

But no one can understand how to reconstruct, so everyone focuses on the second half of the sentence and steals "attraction" in order to "attract attention". As long as they make some gimmicks, no matter whether they buy them or not, people will come to watch the fun.

So in practice, "new retail" has become a particularly useful "package". Specifically, it can be summarized as: renovation, reducing the display density, taking online celebrity goods offline for sale, and increasing the code scanning home delivery service. A standard new retail supermarket was born.

The first box horse to do this really gained a lot of spectators. At that time, many people in the industry felt incredible when shopping, because from the retail point of view, the cost could not be supported at all. Recently, the box horse has quietly made changes, including limiting free delivery for one order a day and charging freight for the second order. At the beginning, the rhetoric of "killing convenience stores within three kilometers around" has obviously become a joke.

Many new retailers change their ideas for the sake of change and often make amateur jokes. For example, in order to pursue minimalist and high-pressure display, some bakeries directly put the prepared bread on the tray for customers to choose-even the basic hygiene requirements are ignored, which requires many laymen to do.

With the proliferation of the above-mentioned "new retail packages", more businesses can't even attract people who are watching. They seem to forget that one of the important reasons why traditional stores are boring is homogenization, the same products, the same display and the same price.

For customers, the "new retail" that follows the trend is nothing more than the X brand washing powder before entering the door, and now the blue X cola is placed in the door. Store renovation costs spread to daily necessities such as fruits, vegetables, meat and eggs. It is much more expensive to change the packaging, but there is almost no difference in quality.

The decoration is really upgraded, and the product is just a fake upgrade. After checking for a while, it was blown away by the wind and rain.

The retrogression of retail core value

Is it valuable to transform the scene experience? Of course there is.

Most of the environment of "new retail" has been upgraded (although the upgrading value of homogenization is limited), and the cost of pseudo-upgrading of products has to be spread into the price of goods, so that customers can pay the bill. What is the difference between its robber logic and the admission fee charged by traditional stores? They all pass on costs and put their own interests first.

Such new retail is also a retrogression of the core value of retail.

What is the core value of retail? Closer to customers, retailers can better serve customers and recommend manufacturers' new products to customers. The traditional channel theory is that although brand A advertises on TV every day, when you enter the store, brand B has a bigger storefront and more promoters, so you can intercept sales at the terminal. The first batch of successful brands in China are almost all channel brands.

Who has more influence on customers now? We often hear that the popularity of XX products is due to a big V recommendation and a slow fire. Do you have any impression that any new brands and products are made by new retail channels? Many so-called new retail stores even rely on their own stores filled with online celebrity products to drain them. After the introduction of traffic, they will ponder how to sell more profitable goods and realize the traffic. The basic retail skills of getting close to customers, understanding customers and serving customers have been fooled by people and freight yards.

Although the original "new retail" has not been realized, it seems that this is an easy road, and everyone has pinned their hopes on it. The landing of Costco broke this illusion.

Many people's sense of collapse, like a person who is not good at cooking, is brainwashed into saying that if you want to cook well, you must first buy a set of equipment. After you buy the equipment home, just wait for the dishes in the pot to automatically become delicious. Suddenly, I heard that the aunt next door could cook a big meal with an old rice cooker, and everyone in the family ran to taste the fragrance.

Who else will eat this dish that looks beautiful but tastes long?