From bingo boxes to function spaces, from RT-Mart to the rainbow, from unmanned stores to unmanned shelves and lockers, unmanned retail becomes the hottest keyword in the new retail sector since the second half of 2017.
In the near future, Ali and the United States Group launched the 'small cabinet', officially entered the field of unmanned shelves, Cheetah Mobile announced the layout of unmanned shelves, 'Leopard Convenience' has been operating since early November, has laid 5000 points.
Various types of capital have also been poured into the field of unattended retail, the acquisition of 380 million yuan for the convenience of A1 round of financing, Sequoia Capital, Huaxing Capital, the speed of China Venture Capital Fund, etc. Have incomplete statistics show that there have been billions Capital smashed into the unmanned retail market.
When the rising popularity of 'no one' is soaring, should we actually take a sober look at what is a real uninformed economy? Is unattended retail really good?
The author once saw the unmanned pipeline in the Lego factory in Denmark, all the products are made using robots, there are no artificial components at all, even the fault prompts and self-tests are also done by the robots.This is the real sense of no People economy.
However, what we now call "unattended retail" is in fact just a seemingly unmanned front desk. However, the monitoring, tally handling and supply of the backstage need to be done by a large number of workers. Under such a model, the labor cost will stay high, It is not exactly the unmanned economy in the real sense.
Moreover, unmanaged economy requires strong technical support, which is not available to all retailers, so we will see a 'strange' - those who know the retail business lack of Internet thinking and technology, while the IT industry, although the hand Grip technology is not even knowledgable about the lack of experience in retail operations and is one of the reasons why unattended retail can sometimes become a "silly" or problematic business operation.
As unmanned shelves and other modes appear, the entrance threshold of unattended retail becomes low, a few hundred dollars to a thousand or so can layout a network, so a large number of industry and capital influx, as long as no one can catch retail retail Making money quickly.This makes the Blue Ocean market in the short term shift to the Red Sea market trend.
And a large number of unmanned stores or unattended shelves of the goods are very homogeneous, the retail industry itself, such a low threshold and the homogenization of the operation will reduce the core competitiveness of the industry. Many industry and the author exchange Pointed out that unmanned stores must sell high turnover goods, especially food and beverage, but such products in various stores really coincidence is very high, in order to compete in the product category advantages are very difficult.
The biggest anxiety should come from profit.
Unmanned stores or unmanned shelves of the product category determines the customer price is not high, sometimes per person only a few dollars to ten dollars a day only a few hundred dollars a day turnover is normal.But unattended retail business due to lack of Man-care in the foreground, so the cargo damage rate will be very high, not only when consumers pick up part of the cargo damage, as well as stores due to temperature control and other natural cargo damage caused.Industry who pointed out that if the standard gross margin If it is 20%, that is to say, the daily turnover of 100 yuan. If the goods are lost 10 yuan a day, basically this business is not profitable.
The next problem associated with cargo damage is expansion, and perhaps everyone feels that expansion is related to capital and winning good business locations, but that if the cargo damage is too high, the greater the expansion, the greater the loss.As mentioned above, even if a network of one day Only loss of 10 yuan of goods, then when the layout to 500 to 1000 outlets, the cargo damage can not imagine.
However, expansion is a must, especially for unmanaged retailers who receive a capital injection of one billion yuan. If they do not have the scale, they will not be able to carry out a platform-based business model subsequently - after all, for them, Store profits are not the most important, the key is the overall layout of the outlets, it is necessary to thousands, the size of million outlets in order to achieve the platform of commercial advantages, then not completely retail business, but other means of profit .
No one retail is currently no one in the foreground, the backstage of artificial high cost; single shop profit difficulties but must be expanded contradictions and tangled rapid development.Many businesses see is not the retail nature, but relying on 'no retail' The investment led by this hot concept and the subsequent other gains, and eventually exit to get a huge profit.
However, things will not always be easy, and if the expansion process, the capital chain problems encountered, it will make the project defeat.When unattended retailers get billion yuan capital injection, they must move all the way forward, can not turn back.
The author estimates that in 2018, there may be a batch of small, medium-sized or underemployed unmanned retailers who may be eliminated or merged, and we will probably see that it is still Those unmanned retailers with large-scale capital institutions or large-scale e-commerce support can finally support it.