People quickly take for granted what they have obtained. Just as few realize that it has only been thirty years since Chinese people could easily buy daily necessities. In the decade after the founding of New China, state-owned department stores were the main channel for commodity circulation. In an era of extremely limited domestic consumption, there was a special business format called "Friendship Stores," which only sold high-end consumer goods and served foreign guests. In 1981, the first supermarket in China, Guangzhou Friendship Store, opened. The new shopping method—no salesclerks, self-service, and computerized checkout—attracted CCTV reporters. But it was not a supermarket for all: the area was less than 300 square meters, with only a dozen shelves of imported goods, and it served only foreigners and overseas Chinese holding "foreign exchange certificates." Just three years later, Shenzhen took the lead in abolishing ration coupons nationwide, ushering in a major reform of the commodity circulation system. In 1992, the chief architect's southern tour led to the establishment of the reform goal of a socialist market economy. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people across the country went into business, and the curtain rose on the market economy. Chinese supermarkets, as the main circulation channel for household consumption, also entered a golden age. The period ended in 2011. That year, Taobao's "Double 11" transaction volume reached 5.2 billion yuan, equivalent to two months of Carrefour's national store performance. Since then, this first foreign supermarket in the mainland has stagnated, with annual sales hovering around 50 billion yuan—in 2014, Alibaba's first "Double 11" after its IPO saw single-day transaction volume exceed that figure. China has never lacked stories of "surviving desperate situations." In 2021, against the backdrop of many supermarkets closing stores, an e-commerce executive at Carrefour said that in 2020, Carrefour's online sales grew over 100% year-on-year, and the online increment almost compensated for offline losses. Today, over 90% of Carrefour China's offline stores have launched instant retail platforms. Looking back, the years of supermarkets' rise in China coincide with a period of dramatic changes in shopping habits: before 1992, in some areas, parents had to use different ration coupons to buy rice and cloth at two separate stores; in 2002, supermarkets became fashionable shopping destinations, and families went to "browse" hypermarkets weekly; in 2012, Tmall's "Double 11" GMV exceeded 10 billion yuan, and we began to envy "free shipping to Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai"; today, instant retail has taken the stage, and people order on platforms like Meituan and receive goods from nearby physical stores within 30 minutes. Behind this, supermarkets have once again returned to the mainstream. Over thirty years of ups and downs in Chinese supermarkets, with growing people's needs, goods on the shelves of street-side stores have "entered homes" and come to people's hands.

01 Prosperity: A Supermarket Within Twenty Steps

At the end of 1995, south of the China International Exhibition Center on the North Third Ring Road in Chaoyang District, Beijing, a store named "Chuangyijia Supermarket" quietly opened. People didn't know its background, but they were amazed by the dazzling array of goods. The location was not ideal: too few parking spaces, only dozens of roadside spots; the road in front was too narrow, and whenever the exhibition center had an event, there would be congestion; there were also two larger malls nearby—Chaoyang Commercial Building and Yanfeng Mall. But "Chuangyijia"'s open-shelf self-service approach was too different from other stores. First, the product layout was ingenious: CDs could be listened to before buying; one-fifth of the store was a food processing area where chefs' skills were on full display; vegetables could be picked and bagged by customers; fishmongers scaled, gutted, chopped, and bagged the fish. Second, the average price of goods was 10% to 20% lower than market prices: a pound of bread was 2 yuan cheaper than nearby bakeries, fresh juice was half the price of food stores, and wild soft-shelled turtles from Fujian also opened Beijingers' eyes. Finally, at the exit, you could see a sizable commercial circle integrating dining, leisure, entertainment, and services. A customer later recalled: "I noticed people were so generous at the checkout, whether by credit card or with 300 or 500 yuan in cash, calm and confident. It seemed like things were free, with no feeling of being ripped off. Only here did consumers experience the joy of shopping." After checking out, when people drove on the Third Ring Road elevated highway next to the exhibition center, they could see a small sign next to Chuangyijia—Carrefour. Five days later, the same sign appeared on Quyang Road in Hongkou District, Shanghai. This largest European retailer entered Beijing and Shanghai successively, and from then on, supermarkets changed the way Chinese people shopped. But in the history of Chinese supermarkets, foreign capital is not the oldest. In 1990, a store with bright colors and a novel style appeared in Humen Town, Dongguan, Guangdong Province. It sold both groceries and general merchandise, and customers selected goods themselves. Even more surprising, a few streets away, an identical store soon appeared. This supermarket named "Meijia" was the first chain supermarket in China. Since then, local supermarkets blossomed across the country, with Shanghai opening a new supermarket almost every three days. In the spring of 1996, a reporter from Xinmin Evening News counted 17 supermarkets on Zhongyuan Road in Shanghai, which was only about 100 meters long, including Hualian, Sanjiaodi, Jinjiang, and Zhenyuan. In just a few years, Chinese people accepted the "supermarket" format and abandoned the closed counters of state-owned department stores. Until 2010, some people still judged a city's development by whether it had Carrefour or Walmart. If you wanted to do physical business, the rent for a mall with these two supermarkets on the first floor was higher. Before the millennium, the prosperity of foreign supermarkets also came at a cost. As terminals connecting consumers, supermarkets had considerable say in the retail system, and obtaining a Sino-foreign joint venture retail license was not easy. Carrefour opened its Sino-foreign joint venture supermarket "illegally" under local government approval beyond their authority. Soon after, Carrefour received rectification requirements and had to remove its store signs for a considerable period. But driven by consumers' surging shopping demand, the power of the "market" solved many problems. On one hand, in 1995, China's per capita GNP exceeded $500, and people's lives were shifting from "subsistence" to "moderately prosperous." On the other hand, local governments, based on the need to attract investment and develop the economy, tended to give foreign retail enterprises a "green light." By 2000, only 28 Sino-foreign joint venture retail enterprises had been formally approved by the central government, while local governments had approved as many as 277 beyond their authority. When China formally joined the WTO in November 2001, half of the world's top 50 foreign retail enterprises had actually entered China, with 90% entering through "tacit understanding" with local governments. That same year, the State Economic and Trade Commission formally rectified non-compliant foreign retail enterprises and began standardized development. The next year, Carrefour opened 12 new stores in China, becoming the champion of supermarket hypermarkets in China. Chinese supermarkets truly entered a golden age. In 2004, China fulfilled its WTO commitments, fully opening the retail industry, and Chinese and foreign supermarkets officially went to war. After a decade of fierce battle, they realized the real opponent was the times.

02 Crisis: Forced to Jump, Self-operated E-commerce

On July 28, 2005, many Shanghai residents rushed out early in the morning to head to Walmart's first store in Shanghai in Pudong New Area. On that hot summer day, Nanquan Road, about a kilometer from the destination, was congested. Industry insiders estimated that at least 100,000 people squeezed into this 18,000-square-meter supermarket that day. On the same day, Lotus, next to Walmart, hung banners and launched an 8th anniversary promotion. The store had been preparing for the anniversary since early June, and choosing this day was largely to counter Walmart. After nearly a decade in China, Walmart's popularity remained high. But shrewd Shanghainese also noticed that the goods here were not particularly cheap. An aunt from Puxi took the free shuttle bus but didn't see promotional rice and cooking oil, and was somewhat disappointed: "It was tiring standing all the way, and when I got to the store, there was nowhere to stand. I wouldn't have come if I'd known." The aunt wanted to compare prices to find the cheapest goods, but she couldn't visit all stores, so she relied on simple experience, thinking the hypermarket was the best bet. The aunt wouldn't be disappointed forever, because e-commerce was slowly sprouting and would crush supermarkets in product variety and price—a scene foreshadowed two years earlier. In 2003, SARS raged across the country, 68 million netizens browsed information online, and 40% tried online shopping. A survey by the China Internet Network Information Center showed that only 4.3% of users "definitely would not" shop online. This small survey was not taken seriously. The newly licensed Sino-foreign joint venture supermarkets were mining China's consumer market as "retail revolutionaries." Financial data showed that from 2003 to 2010, Carrefour opened over 800 stores in China, with annual performance growth of about 30%. Walmart caught up and surpassed Carrefour in 2011. During these years of rapid supermarket development, China's light industrial products gradually shifted from a seller's market to a buyer's market. By the end of 2008, nearly 100 influential industrial clusters had emerged nationwide. After writing stories about the "Sino-foreign supermarket war," reporters often concluded: Chinese people's lives cannot be separated from foreign supermarkets, but 95% of Carrefour's products are made in China. The prosperous Chinese manufacturing industry and huge consumer market also created conditions for the rise of e-commerce. At 0:00:03 on November 11, 2009, Yan Jun from Hejin, Shanxi, recharged his phone on Taobao, completing payment in 14 seconds, unexpectedly becoming the first person to open the "Double 11" door. That year, the number of online shoppers in China exceeded 100 million. Taobao, together with 27 brands, launched the Double 11 promotion during the traditional off-season for supermarkets. Without leaving home, just by moving fingers, you could buy big-name products at half price. Taobao, this huge online mall, shocked Chinese people even more than the birth of supermarkets. After that, supermarkets sensing the crisis also launched e-commerce apps one after another, but most were more talk than action, exploratory in nature, and far from profitable. Walmart launched its online mall in 2010, and even launched an O2O platform "Sugou" in Shenzhen in 2015. Customers could download the app, order on their phones, and have goods delivered home or pick them up at the store. Carrefour was a step behind, testing its online mall app in Shanghai in 2015, and quickly expanding to Beijing, Chengdu, Kunming, and other places. How effective were these "online malls"? In 2018, a reporter tested them and found that Walmart's app had many product categories but lacked the vegetables and fruits that consumers need for three meals a day. Shanghai Carrefour could only deliver by afternoon if ordered in the morning, and users needed to spend at least 129 yuan for free shipping, which was not competitive with e-commerce platforms. The problem was obvious: supermarkets rose by scale, so they were destined to lose to e-commerce platforms with even larger scale. E-commerce platforms aggregate traffic, then move offline formats online, with unlimited time and space, and extremely high monetization efficiency. In this process, both consumers and brands can switch counters at any time. Only the hypermarket, as a channel, becomes the leftover, the object of revolution. Among offline channels, two formats were less impacted by e-commerce: convenience stores and fresh food supermarkets. Because they maximized the "fast" advantage of physical retail, abandoning deep mining of "planned demand" and instead meeting users' "immediate needs"—this is actually the foundation of local stores and the only weapon to compete with e-commerce. It would take at least five more years for Chinese supermarkets to realize this.

03 Alliance: Strange Bedfellows, Traffic Wars

Before supermarkets were ready to take root locally, they took many detours, the most typical being alliances—capital and strategic cooperation between supermarkets and internet giants, ostensibly mutually beneficial, but actually a fight over online and offline traffic. In 2017, JD.com achieved annual sales of 360 billion yuan, up 40% from the previous year. At that time, China's largest offline retailer, China Resources Vanguard, had sales of over 100 billion yuan, with almost no growth. Walmart and Carrefour also stopped expanding and began wave after wave of store closures. It was also at that time that many people proposed the concept of offline traffic, that is, with giants controlling online traffic, turning attention to offline scenarios and converting them into online increments. The O2O war that began in 2016 was a scramble for offline scenarios. Another manifestation was internet giants investing in offline retail entities. Starting in 2014, Alibaba successively took stakes in Intime Retail, Suning, Sanjiang Shopping, and other malls. In 2016, Walmart and JD.com reached a strategic cooperation: Sam's Club joined JD.com, and Walmart stores connected to "JD Daojia." In 2017, Tencent acquired a 5% stake in Yonghui's Super Species, and the next year Carrefour also joined, with the three parties joining forces to embrace online traffic. The core of e-commerce business is traffic. Giants like Alibaba and Tencent seemed to be competing for offline retail, but in reality, they were also seeking new traffic entrances. The more scenarios a company covers, the more complete its ecosystem, the greater its influence on brands, and the more possibilities for the future. This ecosystem war actually started five or six years earlier. In 2008, Meiyijia, a local convenience store chain from Dongguan, cooperated with Taobao, initially helping consumers purchase goods on behalf, and later receiving packages. Meiyijia's predecessor was the Meijia supermarket we mentioned earlier—the first chain supermarket in China. In 1997, when Carrefour entered Dongguan, Meijia transformed into a convenience store format and became Meiyijia. This initial cooperation between physical stores and e-commerce platforms seems bizarre now. In the era before online shopping was widespread, Meiyijia existed as payment points and package stations. Consumers shopping online first had to place an order on Taobao, then take the product code SMS to a Meiyijia clerk to complete payment. Three to seven days later, they returned to the store to pick up the package. In this process, offline stores acted as intermediaries between consumers and e-commerce platforms, earning a payment handling fee and a package collection fee—roughly 2 yuan per 100 yuan. However, the store's own orders did not increase. Consumers frequently visited, and might buy something on the side. But in the long run, traditional supermarkets were helping e-commerce platforms cultivate online shopping habits, squeezing their own market share. When supermarkets transformed according to the logic of traditional e-commerce platforms, they often fell into a left-hand-right-hand traffic battle. In fact, whether supermarkets built their own e-commerce or cooperated with internet giants, they couldn't avoid the question of "where does traffic come from." In 2015, an e-commerce operator lamented: "No matter how beautiful the online platform is, without traffic, it's like opening a physical store in a remote mountain." Many companies directed traffic from physical stores to their own platforms, and registered users grew quickly, but actual operations failed because they didn't control the traffic entrance. And e-commerce giants firmly controlled this. In cooperation, supermarkets seemed to have access to e-commerce platform traffic, but it was hard to convert into effective orders. Consider a scenario: you hear Walmart has joined JD.com and want to buy a pack of toilet paper. When you're about to check out, the system recommends another store selling the same toilet paper at a lower price than Walmart. What would you choose? A single store's supply scale and richness can never match the millions of merchants on the entire platform. If supermarkets keep obsessing over where traffic is and try to beat opponents with their logic, they will never succeed. During the decade-long tug-of-war between supermarkets and e-commerce, a model that could combine online traffic with supermarket supply gradually took root and grew rapidly in first- and second-tier cities. In 2015, the market's pursuit of O2O unexpectedly collided with the "lazy economy," popularizing the food delivery model. In subsequent years, convenience stores and fresh food supermarkets, the two offline formats that grew against the trend, also met consumers' immediate needs similar to ordering food delivery: ordering online and receiving fast delivery offline. These retail entities would, in the future, root themselves in local supply, leverage the instant fulfillment capabilities of food delivery, and find a new path to increase store revenue. Of course, more immediate needs beyond food would not be deeply recognized until 2020.

04 Return: Rooting in Local, Store Innovation

On the day before New Year's Day 2020, Ms. Wei from Wuhan Seafood Market was diagnosed as the first COVID-19 patient. To protect the lives and safety of the vast majority of citizens, China began normalized epidemic prevention and control, just as it had fought SARS. Starting in 2003, e-commerce platforms with richer products gradually became accepted by more Chinese people. During the three years of the pandemic, "instant retail," with its stronger certainty, became the fastest-growing consumption format. Instant retail is not entirely new. In May 2019, the "Walmart Daojia" mini-program was officially launched, allowing customers to order online and have goods delivered within one hour. During the Spring Festival in 2020, when the epidemic broke out, Walmart's overall O2O "Daojia" sales grew over 4 times year-on-year, with "Walmart Daojia" order volume growing as much as 15 times. At the same time, Carrefour announced that its "Daojia business" sales grew 127% year-on-year. Supermarkets' "Daojia business" is a simplified version of "instant retail." In 2020, this former pilot project, driven by full integration with nationwide instant delivery networks like Meituan and the widespread immediate and certain needs of the people, achieved explosive growth. On one hand, traditional e-commerce logistics were severely impacted, with most of China unable to send or receive packages; on the other hand, local offline consumption was also affected, and consumers found it difficult to go to stores to shop. In this situation, instant retail, connecting local supply and local consumption, became the main way to smooth supply and demand. When we talk about "traffic," we're not talking about numbers on a dashboard, but a collection of real needs. If five years ago supermarkets' self-operated e-commerce failed because of scale compared to e-commerce platforms, then the lack of results from O2O attempts was actually due to the times—Chinese people had just learned how to stock up via e-commerce and weren't yet accustomed to the "luxury" of "everything delivered to home." In other words, supermarkets were just moving too fast, and now consumers have finally caught up. From severe supply shortages over 40 years ago, to severe homogenization of various products, to increasingly high demands for quality and service, consumers are no longer satisfied with just the products themselves, nor with waiting three days for delivery, but want to buy anytime, anywhere, and have goods delivered anytime, anywhere. Consumer demand has ignited instant retail and given supermarkets the capital to return to the forefront of change and engage in a new round of competition with e-commerce. E-commerce platforms are remote, delayed delivery, centrally solving the problem of "from nothing to something," that is, moving national suppliers online to open stores. Instant retail is local, immediate delivery, solving the problem of "certainty" in a distributed manner, that is, connecting the physical retail network across the city to achieve regional network effects. E-commerce emphasizes scale; instant retail emphasizes timeliness. When consumers are willing to choose certainty by "ordering online" to visit stores, supermarkets have a chance to turn the tables. Whether Carrefour or Meiyijia, these physical retailers are gradually realizing that rather than cutting their feet to fit the shoes and digging for "planned demand" with e-commerce, it's better to root in local supply and more deeply explore offline "immediate needs." With demand, most of the problem is solved. As for supply, China's developed manufacturing and industrial belts across the country have both "nourished" e-commerce platforms and sustained the survival of hundreds of thousands or millions of small physical stores. National Bureau of Statistics data shows that in 2020, China had 30,000 supermarkets, 35,000 convenience stores, and over 5,700 department stores. In 2002, there were just over 10,000 supermarkets, fewer than 3,400 convenience stores, and only about 1,500 department stores. It is precisely the rich local supply offline that provides the soil for the development of instant retail. The number of physical stores has increased tenfold, meaning local supply has increased tenfold, and the products consumers can choose from have also increased tenfold. With products meeting daily needs and instant delivery capabilities, instant retail has flourished. As urbanization accelerates, more and more consumers will shop through instant retail, and physical merchants will gain market increments. And supermarkets, with the most abundant local supply and the most mature model, will undoubtedly be the biggest beneficiaries of this wave, truly enjoying the dividends of the digital economy for the first time. Looking back at thirty years of Chinese supermarket development, from consumption upgrades to channel changes to format changes, many things have changed. But many things remain unchanged, and we can draw at least three conclusions: First, the most vital formats in the future will be regional and convenient. We often say "well-clothed and well-fed," but what exactly is abundance? For Chinese people 40 years ago, getting more food coupons was enough; for Chinese people 20 years ago, not being looked down upon by state-owned store clerks and having open shelves was satisfying; for Chinese people today, you can buy anything on e-commerce platforms, but there are always times when it's "not enough." Because some things, if delivered late, are as good as not delivered. E-commerce is so developed, yet it only accounts for 25% of total retail sales. What it cannot penetrate, besides big-ticket items like cars, are immediate consumption items like fresh food and medicine. Convenience stores and community fresh food stores have become the few offline formats still growing in recent years because they are rooted locally and are convenient enough. From January to July this year, the transaction volume of supermarkets and convenience stores on Meituan increased by 54%, with mom-and-pop stores growing by as much as 110%. The store manager of a Meiyijia store in Minhang District, Shanghai, said that during the Shanghai epidemic this year, the store's daily order volume rose by up to 10 times. Lawson China's approximately 4,000 stores joined Meituan, bringing a 10% sales increase to physical stores. Chinese people's consumption is becoming more free and flexible, which is also part of "sufficient supply." Second, in the twenty years since Chinese people "touched the internet," physical stores have just begun to enjoy digital dividends. E-commerce has greatly changed Chinese people's consumption habits. We have witnessed the rise of too many "billion-yuan clubs" and have all taken advantage of Pinduoduo, but we rarely hear of a physical store benefiting from e-commerce. Keen brands can enjoy dividends from any era, and savvy consumers can take advantage of any channel. Only supermarkets have seen fewer and fewer customers, left behind by the times. Brand sales are increasing, but store business is getting worse. But if stores, rather than brands, join online platforms, everything changes. If what you want can be delivered in 30 minutes, young people's orders will return from e-commerce to physical stores: order online, a delivery person picks up from the store and delivers, and physical stores gradually have more possibilities. China Chain Store & Franchise Association data shows that in 2021, 80% of supermarkets saw year-on-year growth in online sales. Here, "online sales" for supermarkets does not mean remote e-commerce sales, but local instant retail. In the second quarter of this year, Walmart China's e-commerce accounted for 40% of total sales, and here "e-commerce" refers to the hourly delivery business. No longer obsessed with fighting e-commerce, but increasing store orders through instant retail—this is the first step in supermarket revival. Third, only supermarkets can save themselves, and the value of local supply is time to return. Everyone envies Doraemon, who has everything. "Want something, get it immediately"—this innate consumer need seemed like a luxury thirty years ago, but now it seems like the near future. Over thirty years, Chinese supermarkets emerged as revolutionaries against "state-owned department stores," awakening Chinese people's consumption consciousness. Later, e-commerce platforms "used traffic to command physical entities" and defeated supermarkets with greater scale. Even offline, supermarkets face competition from more flexible formats like convenience stores and fresh food supermarkets. Consumer demand has shifted from "more" to "faster." After years of online-offline competition, supermarkets have finally realized they cannot use their shortcomings to compete with others' strengths. Local supply is the key to the growth of formats like convenience stores and the lifeblood of physical retail. China has many local brands, and even more physical stores than brands. The once-prosperous urban local convenience circle should also return amid consumers' pursuit of certainty. Now, supermarkets and convenience stores have stepped into the same river, beginning to rebuild the lost "nearby" and sell goods to surrounding consumers. Instant retail needs supply, physical stores need delivery, and the two complement each other. After more than twenty years of digital retail development in China, online and offline have unexpectedly become connected in an interdependent way.

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Live Stream Topic: "Discussion: Is 'RFID + Digitalization' the Evolution Direction for FMCG Supply Chains?" Time: September 29 (Thursday) 20:00-22:00 Host: Chen Siting, CEO of New Distribution Guests: Xu Ming, General Manager of Cainiao Logistics Technology IoT; Weng Zhangxian, Technical Director of Uni-President China Digital Center; Cao Zhimin, General Manager of China Resources Snow Breweries National Operations Center; Zhao Haoyu, Senior Expert in Digital Supply Chain at Cainiao Logistics Technology With the digitization of products brought by RFID, how can we build a digital supply chain system for FMCG manufacturers on this basis? How can we solve the deep-rooted problems of traditional supply chains mentioned earlier? New Distribution has invited several brand managers, marketing experts, and professional service providers to join the live stream to discuss the evolution of FMCG supply chains in the new era and new market environment.