---
title: "Sunshine Supermarket GM: Adjustments Without Category Management Are All in Vain"
description: "As we enter 2026, supermarket adjustments are no longer a new concept. Many companies try to copy benchmarks to find a cure, but few achieve a closed-loop business logic. In a recent interview, Si Kai, GM of Handan Sunshine Supermarket, shares his 30 years of frontline experience, emphasizing that retail has no mysticism; all growth must be built on a scientific framework. He argues that adjustments without target customers, category logic, and efficiency models are all in vain."
author: "赵胜男"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2026-03-19"
categories: "Consumer & Categories, Management & Methods, Retail Formats"
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---

# Sunshine Supermarket GM: Adjustments Without Category Management Are All in Vain

> As we enter 2026, supermarket adjustments are no longer a new concept. Many companies try to copy benchmarks to find a cure, but few achieve a closed-loop business logic. In a recent interview, Si Kai, GM of Handan Sunshine Supermarket, shares his 30 years of frontline experience, emphasizing that retail has no mysticism; all growth must be built on a scientific framework. He argues that adjustments without target customers, category logic, and efficiency models are all in vain.

As we enter 2026, supermarket adjustments are no longer a new concept.
From environmental renovations to salary restructuring, many companies attempt to copy benchmarks to find a cure for revival, but after the noise, few cases truly achieve a closed-loop business logic.
Why is it that everyone is making adjustments, but few succeed?
Recently, "Innovative Retail Club" conducted an in-depth interview with Si Kai, General Manager of Handan Sunshine Supermarket. This veteran, who has worked on the retail frontline for 30 years, has managed the expansion of a company from a single store to hundreds of stores from 0 to 1.
In his view, retail has no mysticism; all growth must be built on a deterministic scientific framework. "Adjustments without target customers, category logic, and efficiency models are all in vain."
Why would an old retail professional use such strong words as "in vain"? Behind this is a set of operational insights he has developed over 30 years on the retail frontline.
"Innovative Retail Club" has organized the interview content into an article for your reference.
Why are many adjustments becoming more dangerous?
Adjustments are not new.
Si Kai has been in the supermarket business for 30 years, having deeply participated in the expansion of a Hubei retailer from a single store to hundreds of stores, and led the entire iteration process from the first-generation store to the fifth-generation store.
In his view, adjustments should be the operational instinct of retailers to combat aging, and they have always existed. It's just that in the past, the overall environment was too good, and many people didn't have a strong sense of crisis.
But today is different.
Behind this round of adjustments is the fact that many companies are forced to do so. The problem is that everyone has fallen into a common misconception: thinking that as long as the environment is renovated, employees get raises, and culture is upgraded, growth will automatically return.
Many companies, before making adjustments, haven't even figured out where their problems lie, where their advantages are, or what path suits them, and they start blindly copying benchmarks. The result is that they only do the form, but efficiency doesn't follow.
The current industry-wide focus on corporate culture and salary increases is a typical example.
Benchmark companies activate their organizations by increasing employee income, and this logic is valid. But this method is not suitable for all companies, and not everyone can directly copy it.
For many companies with weak profitability or even on the verge of losses, if they significantly increase labor costs without improving operational efficiency, the result is often not activating the team but further compressing profit margins and amplifying operational risks.
For example, a retail company in Jiangxi, already in a loss-making state, invested over ten million yuan in adjustments, including salary increases and cultural construction, but only learned superficial things and failed. Such adjustments, detached from their financial capacity, are basically gambling on the future.
Si Kai said directly, "Salary increases don't necessarily improve efficiency; in the end, it depends on whether customers buy it."
Before making adjustments, ask yourself:
Where are your underlying advantages?
In Si Kai's view, truly effective adjustments cannot start with tactical actions; you must first answer three fundamental questions:
  * Who are your target customers?
  * What is your most advantageous business format?
  * Where are your advantageous categories?
If these three questions are not clear, the more adjustment actions you take, the further you deviate.
1. Who are your target customers?
Many retailers, when making adjustments, easily fall into the trap of targeting all customer groups, wanting to capture both the elderly and the young.
This ambition of wanting both is defined by Si Kai as strategic laziness—trying to do business with everyone often means doing no one's business well.
Long-term frontline experience has led Si Kai to develop a set of ideas for determining target customers, which can be summarized as the "Triple Play for Determining Target Customers."
1) Find the right direction: Determining the target customer group is not for filling out forms, but to derive a clear hypothetical target through data analysis and market research, and turn it into a unified will of the entire company.
2) Support with evidence: Whether the profile is accurate is a technical issue, but whether there is a profile is an attitude issue. Only when procurement, store managers, and even stock clerks reach a consensus on the target customer group can the company's efforts be aligned.
3) Find the effect: By identifying the key minority that brings core value among the mass customer base, supermarkets can allocate resource priorities according to their preferences.
In the end, it's about completely abandoning the arrogance of "I stock what you buy" and returning to the duty of "you want what I supply."
2. What is your most advantageous business format?
The choice of business format must be based on the company's operational genes. Si Kai believes that retail has no universal remedy, only model adaptation.
This understanding stems from his real area experiments over the past 30 years, where he personally managed stores ranging from 100m2 to 8000m2, spanning several generations of store iterations.
Practice has proven that his team is not suitable for large store formats; due to slower turnover and longer supply chains, overall efficiency drops sharply.
After continuous verification, they found that a comprehensive supermarket of around 3000 square meters best fits the team's organizational capabilities and supply chain genes.
Within this area, the team can precisely control product structure and display efficiency, forming a standardized profit model, and this focus brings highly competitive output.
In county or prefecture-level city markets, a 3000-square-meter store can support a sales scale of 100 million yuan per store and maintain stable profitability.
3. Where are your advantageous categories?
The key word for building advantageous categories: differentiation!
Si Kai repeatedly emphasized that differentiation is never about leading in all aspects, but about surpassing all competitors in specific categories.
A supermarket doesn't need to be better than others in every category, but it must have its own protagonist, the so-called destination category.
Taking industry benchmarks as an example, Shiyan Shoukang's alcohol category alone can reach 1 billion yuan. In the local area, consumers have formed the absolute perception of "buy alcohol at Shoukang." Another example is Anhui Lecheng Supermarket's vegetables and Lianjia Supermarket's pork.
The logic behind this is not complicated. By becoming the regional first choice in one or two key categories, supermarkets can stand firm in fierce market competition.
This is the real competitive barrier.
Why must true adjustments start with category management?
Once the three questions above are clear, adjustments truly begin. And once you enter the practical level, the core lever is not the environment, not slogans, not following trends, but category management.
Why?
"Store area is limited, shelf length is limited, and employee energy is limited. If adjustments don't touch category logic, employees will still be overwhelmed by redundant SKUs and inefficient replenishment. The salary increase you give will eventually be offset by low efficiency."
Si Kai bluntly stated that today, the biggest problem in product selection for many companies is mechanically copying benchmarks, especially liking to imitate Pangdonglai.
But the problem is that a product selling well at Pangdonglai doesn't mean it will sell well in a different region, with a different customer base, or in a different business ecosystem.
"Blindly following is a big taboo in retail. The era of simply pursuing SKU quantity is over; now it's the trend of refined management."
Take Costco as an example: Costco stores have only 4,000 products, but their revenue is very impressive.
For instance, in oral care, Costco has only 23 SKUs, divided into children (4: 2 brushes, 1 paste, 1 rinse) and adults (19: 5 brushes, 8 pastes, 3 rinses, 2 floss, 1 cleaner).
Although the SKUs are few, they cover all core functional needs such as anti-sensitivity, herbal, and whitening. Customers' core needs are not missing; instead, choices are clearer and efficiency is higher.
Si Kai also shared a real case he once managed: "In a supermarket I previously managed, the soy sauce category SKUs were cut from over 100 to 68. After cutting nearly 40% of redundant products, the category's sales and gross profit not only didn't drop but grew year after year."
Why is that?
Because from the physical conditions of the shelf, space is limited.
On a shelf with 5 layers, each holding 17 bottles of soy sauce, the effective area can only support 85 facings. Based on an average of 2 facings per SKU, the optimal number of SKUs should be around 40.
When SKUs pile up to over 100, the display space for core products is extremely compressed, and the extra products only lower turnover efficiency, causing employees to replenish 4 to 5 times a day, resulting in a lot of ineffective labor between the warehouse and the sales floor.
How exactly should you streamline?
  * First, reduce in the replacement layer, i.e., reduce duplicate specifications, brands, and flavors; add in the conversion layer, i.e., add specialty items like children's soy sauce, seafood sashimi soy sauce, and matsutake soy sauce.
  * Second, allocate resources by contribution. Best-sellers should not be reduced but increased, expanding from 2 facings to 8-10 facings.
The facings freed up by reducing products are given to best-sellers, which not only reduces restocking frequency and improves labor efficiency but also acts as natural promotion through enlarged displays.
The restocking frequency for core products drops from 5 times a day to 2 times, giving employees more energy to focus on product freshness and customer interaction, naturally improving service quality. The resulting revenue also provides the company with the underlying confidence for continuous salary increases, forming a positive cycle of business.
Conclusion
The dividends of adjustments never come from imitating superficial aspects, but from the brutal reconstruction of supply chain and category logic. Under the squeeze of national giants and the discount wave, the only way for regional supermarkets to survive is to squeeze the efficiency of every square meter and every SKU to the extreme.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 赵胜男
- Published: 2026-03-19
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/sunshine-supermarket-gm-adjustments-without-category-management-are-all-8bfaea41/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gkmnxUHDn57zNqC97XW7Gw

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