The editorial department of Lianshang.com saw a phrase on the internet a few years ago: "You're old, so you deserve to die!" This phrase seems somewhat harsh, but it is also a rule. Today, traditional supermarkets are also facing the impact of continuously emerging new retail formats.

But we don't know, in the face of such a heavy store inventory, what courage and boldness traditional supermarkets can use to break and establish, to bring a thorough change to the market, including employee appearance, product performance, supplier hierarchy, cooperation policies, etc. Many things, if they are currently ineffective and show no early signs of future success, correcting them as soon as possible may be the best choice! Even Pangdonglai has its limitations, just like loss-making stores. Yu Donglai also said that if losses are large and performance is poor, closing them is also a good thing. This way, the enterprise can have more resources to hold on to good stores, better reflect the basic resources, and have more energy to do things with greater leverage value.

Self-rescue of physical retail

But doing well is still our expectation, because for many large stores, they still play a significant role in solving employment, service radiation, and related industries. In the past two years, traditional supermarkets have also made a lot of transformation efforts, such as transforming into membership stores, trying discounting, reducing area, simplifying items, adjusting stores, doing small formats, and carrying out digitalization, but for the overall market, the overall effect seems limited. Physical retail cannot, like online companies, drastically change the customer interface overnight. Under the traditional management system, whether it is the national headquarters or regional headquarters, it seems difficult to make significant improvements to the brand image in a short time. Adjusting one by one often ends up being a seesaw game.

After nearly a decade of impact from new retail, today we can see more clearly that the physical retail industry is essentially a slow business, so it also needs to use slow logic to do every link of the ecosystem well, and Pangdonglai, Sam's Club, and Costco have always been practicing this. Having experienced impetuousness and impact, the traditional retail industry needs to return to its original logic. For many stores, product aging, inflated prices, employees without passion, stores without vitality, lack of vitality from headquarters to stores, many businesses become a vicious cycle, and organizational hierarchy and corruption issues make the entire enterprise organization very cumbersome, making change extremely difficult. Just like China Resources Vanguard, the enterprise is still positioning itself to transform into a premium supermarket, but seeing the comparison below, it is hard to have confidence.

So today's store closures are more about the accumulation of past problems. With further online competition, the supply structure of the entire market may face further oversupply. For those inefficient stores, when everything enters a vicious cycle, perhaps closing earlier is the best outcome.

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