---
title: "From the Perspective of Social Infrastructure, the Retail Industry Has Huge Space"
description: "Facing the raging pandemic, Li Ling, a consultant for Lianshang.com, called on China's retail industry to evolve into a social infrastructure service, emphasizing its importance, uniqueness, and complexity. The author agrees with Li's advocacy for retail and social responsibility, and further extends this topic. Under the pandemic, retail for daily necessities benefits, while quality and leisure retail face difficulties, with greater challenges ahead."
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published: "2022-05-28"
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# From the Perspective of Social Infrastructure, the Retail Industry Has Huge Space

> Facing the raging pandemic, Li Ling, a consultant for Lianshang.com, called on China's retail industry to evolve into a social infrastructure service, emphasizing its importance, uniqueness, and complexity. The author agrees with Li's advocacy for retail and social responsibility, and further extends this topic. Under the pandemic, retail for daily necessities benefits, while quality and leisure retail face difficulties, with greater challenges ahead.

Facing the raging pandemic, Li Ling, a consultant for Lianshang.com, called on China's retail industry to evolve into a social infrastructure service, emphasizing its importance, uniqueness, and complexity. The author agrees with Li's advocacy for retail and social responsibility, and further extends this topic.
******Retail under the pandemic**
**Daily necessity retail benefits, quality and leisure retail face difficulties, with greater challenges ahead**
The social economy is like a large flywheel, originally running at high speed with smooth connections. Due to the pandemic's disruption and puncture, various bumps and delays have appeared. The current state is undoubtedly difficult to evaluate using past efficiency logic.
For the retail industry, according to the national standard "Classification of Retail Formats," there are as many as 17 retail formats. But using the pandemic as a yardstick, we only divide them into three levels: daily necessity, quality, and enjoyment.
During the anti-epidemic period, for daily necessity supermarkets, if not shut down, many stores saw benefits. Most supermarkets experienced panic buying, and many community group buying platforms grew accordingly. The pandemic is certainly the biggest driver. Companies and individuals with channel advantages definitely enjoyed a wave of current-affairs dividends. Many supermarket brand retailers were included in the government's supply guarantee list, holding special passes for continuous operation during the pandemic, and enjoying the right to operate continuously during the epidemic.
Group buying, home delivery, private domains, and other online channels continued to see order surges, with overtime and additional staff, benefiting both others and themselves! Except for short-term shortages of high-freshness products, the total market supply was sufficient and stable. In this process, most supermarkets, as main channels, played an indelible social hub role.
But the vast majority of quality and enjoyment retail, as well as some non-supply-guaranteed enterprises, were miserable. Department stores, shopping centers, mother-and-baby stores, electrical appliance specialty stores, dine-in restaurants, entertainment experience retail, and other stores were deserted, and many were directly shut down. With offline operations halted, most tried to save themselves through online, community, and live-streaming methods. Depending on the category's characteristics and benefits, it was difficult to match normal times.
We believe that one day the pandemic situation will improve, but the damage caused by this cycle will undoubtedly have a major impact on the entire socio-economic structure. Quality and leisure retail are precisely the main incremental structure of the whole society. The closure of these formats will cause economic vitality to lose blood. Although society focuses on survival during extraordinary times, the whole society really needs a long cycle to digest this transition cost, and new resource allocation and value reconstruction require an even longer cycle.
On the other hand, some new entrants that grew during the pandemic will further divide the existing market. Therefore, many impacts are generally not when things happen, but often after things happen! The difficulty of fighting the epidemic may not be now, but after the epidemic. This is what we need to see.
For many retail enterprises, it is the transmission and lag effects of the streets, business districts, cities, and industrial clusters we are in. All people and all enterprises undoubtedly need to resist this impact.
Antibodies mean we no longer panic, but immunity can only rely on strength.
******During the pandemic, administrative governance dominates; retail is just a generalized part of social resources**
We hope everything can be preserved and the internal circulation momentum of the economy can be sustained to the greatest extent. This involves the dimensions of government decision-making and national governance, shifting to the broader perspective of international mechanisms and administrative leadership.
Unlike normal operations, during the pandemic, the government's administrative power became the axis of social operation. Social conventions and social psychology influenced people's behavioral decisions. Under lockdown, the public's group safety threshold decreased, and social psychology such as conformity and group unconsciousness led to concentrated and targeted outbreaks of basic needs, forming a huge supply-demand gap with targeted supply in the short term.
The panic buying and hoarding we see—is it because society really lacks resources? Is it because commercial efficiency is low? Obviously neither! It is just a short-term tidal wave in resource flow. It originates from government governance, and the efficiency of government governance affects the duration of these contradictions!
During this duration, there are actually huge issues of efficiency connection and resource allocation among the state machine, social public, commercial forces, and social forces. Various forces are making their own mutual domestication decisions, eventually leading to the situation we see.
State power is undoubtedly the protagonist. From an administrative perspective, how to rank the importance of social security, livelihood issues, and economic development, and how to make decisions, tests wisdom and determination! This may be involved in epidemics, wars, and major events!
When social operation becomes administrative-led, all forces should think about how to adapt to and please the urgent needs of social governance. People, things, affairs, technology... having strength and being needed is the real value! Daily necessity retail is undoubtedly the largest force for collaboration, stability maintenance, and support in this process. So from this perspective, the significance of the retail industry emerges.
Using this yardstick to look at whether retail is infrastructure, we will be very clear. Retail is a barometer of the social economy. All its stress responses stem precisely from its foundational and extensive nature!
The retail cluster composed of numerous enterprise brands and retailers at all levels has always played the role of ensuring livelihood, delivering value, and conveying emotions. From these logics, retail has always been functioning as infrastructure services!
If we have strong resource endowments, efficient logistics, modern operational means, and scientific risk control levels, we should definitely be part of social infrastructure, and we will definitely be called upon first in government governance and recognized first by the public. Those enterprises that were shut down due to inadequate prevention and control or fined for price gouging should be ashamed of their operational level.
And taking a step further, this level is indeed the result of the enterprise's own growth and accumulation! In normal times, how commercial forces develop, how existing operating methods or business areas expand, how technological forces break through, and how internal governance is efficient...
These are all self-cultivation within the cognitive scope. Today's situation is like a big exam, testing the purity of our qualities, abilities, and strengths! Living in the present and coping with the future can find indexes from crises.
Historically, the retail industry has always been an important force in national governance. CPI monitoring, total retail sales of consumer goods statistics, and various policies, laws, and guidance from the 11th to 14th Five-Year Plans all reflect the state's recognition of the retail industry's status. China's retail industry itself has also achieved remarkable accomplishments. The government has its own strength, the market has greater strength, and normal operations still follow this structure.
In the end, it is a question of the retail industry's self-positioning: during the pandemic, how to coordinate with administrative forces, and in the future, how to continue self-development?
Compared with people's beautiful expectations, the gap brings disappointment, but it also breeds hope! The pandemic is a catalyst, a yardstick, and a lighthouse.
******From the perspective of social infrastructure: the retail industry has huge space**
What is infrastructure? Baidu Baike defines transportation, posts and telecommunications, water and electricity, commercial services, scientific research and technology, landscaping, environmental protection, culture and education, and health services all as infrastructure. If we are more academic, we can dig deeper into the connotation of infrastructure:
**1. Infrastructure should be basic existence, basic configuration, and basic guarantee; without it, things cannot work!**
Obviously, not all retail is in this category. Retail is a format that focuses on transferring value. What needs to be solidified is actually the source, the production end, and the logistics end. Therefore, for the retail industry, what we need to continuously cultivate are still those simple, basic areas—building a good supply chain.
How to evaluate it as good? In extraordinary times, we can get goods earlier than others! Why can we have such rapid response capability? It is worth breaking down and building capabilities.
**2. If it is infrastructure, there must be a large amount of standardized investment, easy for external elements to use and connect, and it should be an open system.**
Is the retail industry, or our enterprises, standard enough, easy to understand, and open enough? Suppose our enterprise is temporarily converted into a public unit, with a large number of external goods needing to enter the warehouse, be distributed, and transshipped, and a large number of personnel and vehicles needing to be dispatched. Can our enterprise undertake such command, coordination, and scheduling capabilities? When the workload increases by an order of magnitude, can our systems, accounting, and efficiency calculations manage every node?
Obviously, many enterprises find it difficult! The pandemic's revelation to us is more about whether we can withstand the unconventional. So-called capability is roughly like this.
**3. So-called infrastructure should be able to connect with broader functions, have additional attributes and functional extensions, and have strong inclusiveness.**
What can our enterprises carry? Extend? Connect? When water, electricity, and network infrastructure are connected, various household appliances can be used immediately. What can our enterprises connect so that various goods, services, and support can be quickly used?
Most of our enterprises are linked to the production end, have logistics, suppliers, stores, and customers. Judging by extreme standards, these links and carrying capacities are far from plug-and-play. The connection efficiency is stumbling. From this perspective, many of our retail enterprises are basic enough but do not qualify as infrastructure.
**4. All infrastructure must have strong sociality and coverage, can bear high loads, and can be expanded on a large scale.**
This sociality relies on solid basic skills, long-term reputation, and user trust. Do our enterprises have such thickness?
**5. All infrastructure, when needed, can have universality, publicness, and convenience.**
Do our enterprises have such attitudes and capabilities?
......
Breaking it down, it is more like what we call platformization and ecosystem. Building infrastructure involves investment, standardization, aggregation, and extension, from breaking the situation, amplifying, to starting the flywheel. All of this falls on our specific enterprises and entrepreneurs.
Retail's own supply channels, logistics and transportation, and efficient intelligent systems can all be starting points for infrastructure, but only by growing stronger can many things qualify.
From these perspectives, we repeatedly say that many enterprises are far from doing enough! It is also from these perspectives that we can see the pattern of some enterprises. At the same time, from these perspectives, we can find some direction.
Of course, we have always understood the difficulty of enterprise development and growth! All our "shoulds" and expressions are actually oriented towards a more fundamental future.
******The future of retail: return to basics and actively save yourself**
But for now, we must survive first to have a seat at the table! Discussing the retail industry from a social perspective and looking at enterprise brand operations from a survival dimension is often a contradictory yet unified process. Retail in the social sense is the great way, while retail in the survival sense is the small principle. Only by integrating the big and small principles can the overall survival strength grow.
Today, changes in the environment make everything feel difficult. For existing retail, whether for survival or transformation, in the past two years, the industry's mentality has evolved into a defensive and resistant stance. The existing market means more reshuffling and structural adjustment. Many things happening today make us realize: loss of control may come tomorrow. To survive, we must continuously extend the safety line.
Rather than being anxious, it is better to be mindful. The harder it gets, the simpler the principles! Different enterprises have different situations and survival paths. For large retail, some principles are basic and universal:
1. Channels should make more interest concessions and ecological coordination; in difficult times, sharing hardships is a common axiom; 2. Define our scenarios and consumers, redefine product groups, and focus on digging depth; 3. Cherish every cost and always create cost-effectiveness; 4. Truly integrate online and offline without distinction, and examine efficiency value; 5. With an ecological perspective, let every business unit survive independently, and organizational strength is always the core.
On the issue of survival and development, no matter how the industry defines it or how policies guide it, enterprises ultimately have only one path: self-rescue. Whether it is infrastructure often depends on our value; others define value for us because of our value! Retail is already basic, but it still needs cultivation.
May the pandemic pass soon, and may everything be as beautiful as before.
Source: Lianshang.com News
(ID: lingshouzixun) Author: Shangjia, member of Lianshang Senior Advisory Group


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