Recently, the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce and 10 other departments issued the 'Guidelines for Building Urban 15-Minute Convenience Life Circles', setting a goal that by 2025, through creating '100 cities and 1,000 circles', a batch of urban convenience life circles will be built that are well-laid-out, complete in business types, fully functional, smart and convenient, standardized and orderly, with quality services and harmonious business-resident relations. The level of convenience, standardization, intelligence, and quality will be comprehensively improved, playing a greater role in serving basic people's livelihood, promoting consumption upgrades, and smoothing the micro-circulation of the urban economy, with resident satisfaction in pilot areas reaching over 90%. The author recalls that recently, the opening of three convenience stores in Beijing subway stations became a hot search topic, and combined with the strengthening of Beijing's supportive policies for convenience stores in recent years, it is not hard to see that convenience stores are becoming a hot retail format. Among the first batch of pilot convenience store projects in Beijing, JD Convenience Store is prominently listed. It is understood that many consumers, after seeing the news, specifically went to the store to 'check in'. △ Inside the JD Convenience Store Solving the 'Three Halves' Problem, Diverse Services for Convenience The JD Convenience Store pilot at Beijing Subway is located in the east hall of Caishikou Station on Line 7, with a building area of 56 square meters. It is understood that the store not only provides regular products such as water, drinks, snacks, short-shelf-life food, and daily necessities to meet the essential daily needs of office workers, but also offers fresh produce to nearby consumers and office workers through pre-sale and self-pickup. By opening the JD Convenience GO service, passengers can order via mobile phone without leaving the station and pick up their purchases in-store. Frankly speaking, this JD Convenience Store is no longer just a convenience store selling in-store products, but a modern, intelligent, multi-service convenience service terminal. In the past, many industry insiders called Beijing a 'convenience store desert'. When discussing the reasons behind this, industry insiders summarized the core as 'three halves': half a street, half a year, and half a day. That is, Beijing's roads are wide, making it inconvenient to cross, so business can only be done on half a street; half a year, because winters are cold and fewer people go out; half a day, because the distance between residence and office is far, and the peak business hours are only half a day. Behind the 'three halves' is actually the problem of high costs and low profits. The key to solving these problems lies in operational efficiency. JD Convenience Store's approach to improving operational efficiency is reflected in three aspects:

  1. Although they all provide basic daily necessities, the products in JD Convenience Store are based on the living and working conditions of the surrounding consumer groups, relying on the Zhanggui Bao APP and JD Zhanggui Manager intelligent management system to achieve 'thousand stores, thousand faces' intelligent product selection, and precise matching of store products to meet passenger shopping needs.
  2. Self-checkout machines with facial recognition, face payment, and other technological equipment can greatly improve store sales efficiency while reducing unnecessary labor costs.
  3. Through services such as pre-sale self-pickup and JD Convenience GO, it can effectively break through time and space limitations, allowing passengers to enjoy household and daily necessities without leaving the station. These not only provide consumers with a better and more convenient lifestyle but also improve the profitability of single stores. Of course, in addition to these, the JD Convenience Store located in the subway is centered on convenient and warm services. The store provides free hot water, free charging, free bag storage, and courier services to make travel more convenient; provides medicine boxes, toolboxes, spare masks, disinfectants, etc., to make travel safer; provides old clothes recycling, old battery recycling, etc., to make travel more environmentally friendly; and provides document printing, photo printing, mobile phone repair, and other services to make travel more efficient. △ A corner inside the JD Convenience Store The store also has smart advertising machines that can cooperate with the subway and government for epidemic prevention, environmental protection, and party and government publicity, making travel more orderly; the store will also regularly launch activities such as exclusive employee meals and caring rescue meals, making travel more loving. In addition, based on JD Group's rich ecosystem resources, JD Convenience Store provides passengers and nearby consumers with diverse ecosystem content, such as JD Allianz Insurance, JD Reading, and JD Health. Through these diverse and thoughtful services, a small convenience store truly realizes a 15-minute convenience life circle. In addition to JD Convenience Store, the first Jingxi Convenience Store opened in Tianjin in mid-June also takes the creation of a community ecosystem and convenient life circle to the extreme, and is also a response to the Ministry of Commerce's 15-minute convenience policy. Creating a Resident Life Circle, Responding to the 15-Minute Convenience Unlike JD Convenience Store, which is positioned for business and travel consumption scenarios, Jingxi Convenience Store is positioned as a life service store, focusing on life and home scenarios, providing community residents with diverse consumption experiences such as buy-now-get-now, pre-sale self-pickup, home delivery, and life services. △ Inside the Jingxi Convenience Store From the first Jingxi Convenience Store opened in Tianjin, in addition to snacks, household items, and grain, oil, and seasonings based on community residents, it also has a fruit and vegetable self-pickup area and a convenience service area. Centered on community scenarios, Jingxi Convenience Store not only connects to JD Service+ to meet residents' various life services such as housekeeping, clothing cleaning, and home appliance repair. In addition, through integrated online and offline operations, Jingxi Convenience Store provides consumers with multiple shopping methods such as in-store purchase, in-store pickup, and home delivery, meeting diverse shopping needs. According to the person in charge of the Jingxi Convenience Store project, Jingxi will use the store as a carrier, driven by both product supply chain and service supply chain, and work with upstream and downstream partners to enhance store operational capabilities and boost physical retail while bringing consumers high-quality, low-priced products and diverse, reliable, and convenient services, achieving a win-win situation for all parties. Regarding the 'Guidelines for Building Urban 15-Minute Convenience Life Circles' issued by the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce and other departments, it is mentioned that the urban 15-minute convenience life circle is a community business circle formed by multi-format aggregation, with community residents as the service target, a service radius of about 15 minutes on foot, and the goal of meeting residents' basic consumption and quality consumption needs. In the past, convenience stores only had in-store product services, but now with the policy advocacy of the 15-minute life circle, it is believed that more and more convenience stores, like JD Convenience Store and Jingxi Convenience Store, will not only meet shopping needs based on products but also meet the needs of surrounding services, continuously satisfying consumers' diverse and one-stop service needs. Whether it is the products and services of JD Convenience Store or Jingxi Convenience Store, they are backed by the core advantages of JD Group's Jingxi Business Group in supply chain, logistics, technology, as well as the ability to penetrate goods and manage product supply chains. Through the interpretation of JD Convenience Store and Jingxi Convenience Store, we find that although the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce and other departments are advocating the 'Guidelines for Building Urban 15-Minute Convenience Life Circles' and vigorously developing the convenience store retail format, the challenges are not small. Compared with the past, convenience stores' requirements for products and services are also constantly improving. Convenience, standardization, and intelligence require that convenience stores are not simply 'product convenience' stores, but 'diverse life' stores that can carry services, social interaction, and even culture. Small stores must be able to serve big scenarios. This places higher demands on convenience store brands. Of course, we see that represented by JD Convenience Store and Jingxi Convenience Store, they are bringing some paradigms and ideas to the industry. Centered on facilitating people's livelihood and improving the quality of life of the masses, convenience stores use digital upgrading as a starting point, upgrading both front-end and back-end to improve operational efficiency. With diverse services as the core, integrating convenience stores into a complex of multiple small formats, linking more formats, and improving service capabilities, it is possible to truly achieve the government's advocated goal of a '15-minute convenience life circle'. Are you 'watching' me?