The unmanned supermarket is dead, it is better to choose the vending machine!

Now finally no one discusses unmanned supermarkets anymore, which means that the money-burning war has come to an end. After 4 billion burned out, all of them were swimming naked. In July 2017, Taobao's first unmanned convenience store opened, starting a frenzy of unmanned retail. Including JD.com and Suning, countless brick-and-mortar retailers and Internet entrepreneurial teams have been involved in this trend. Players and capital, like crucian carp crossing the river, flooded into this track. There are 138 unmanned retail companies such as Bingo Box, F5 Future Store, Take GO and so on. According to data from iResearch Consulting, as of the end of 2017, a total of 25,000 unmanned retail shelves and 200 unmanned convenience stores have been installed across the country. The new outlet of unmanned retail has attracted a total of over RMB 4 billion in investment throughout the year. Shared bicycles. However, the tuyere comes faster and goes faster. No one expected that when the autumn wind passed that year, only a chicken feather would be seen. The first batch of Bingo Box unmanned convenience stores in Shanghai closed as early as September 2017 due to high temperatures. After entering 2018, it has successively exposed negative news such as layoffs, executive departures, and performance failures. On July 31, 2018, another neighboring convenience store, which was regarded as the dark horse of the unmanned convenience industry in the early days of its establishment, closed more than 160 stores in Beijing on July 31, 2018. The company announced that due to a monthly loss of 5 million, continued losses and lack of hematopoietic capacity, it has basically gone bankrupt. The unmanned shelves that were once favored by capital, many brands have fallen down like dominoes. At the beginning of 2018,'GOGO Xiaochao' announced the cessation of operations, which was the first unmanned shelf company to close down in the country. Since then, Xingjian has laid off 60% of its BD staff; in May, seven koalas ceased shelf business; in the same month, Chuanguo Xiaomei’s financing was stranded and wages were not paid; in June, Chuanhami closed down; in October, Xiaomei Flash Technology filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. So far, the vigorous unmanned retail model has basically declared bankruptcy. So, who is the murderer who killed the unmanned store? After the blind and out-of-control market competition for unmanned retail outlets opened, countless companies rushed into it, and various terminal forms such as unmanned convenience stores and unmanned shelves launched fierce and disorderly competition. In order to grab the beach market, unmanned stores are aggressively enclosing land, and land enclosing requires capital support, and the boundary between burning money and realizing has become infinitely blurred. From a 5,000-person community, to 2,000, and finally to a small place of 500 people, the standard for the number of people in the community where unmanned shops enter has dropped again and again. Unmanned shelves have developed to the extent that as long as there are people in the company, they can go in and shop the containers regardless of the three or seventy-one. The entrants went from the first-tier cities to the second-tier cities, and then to the third- and fourth-tier cities, leaving the countryside behind. In the blind expansion, they made the same mistakes as shared bicycles. History is always surprisingly similar. When the capital winter comes, unmanned retail quickly enters the ice. The cost of'unmanned' is higher. So far, the essence of all unmanned stores on the market is to replace cashiers with artificial intelligence. Replenishment, cleaning, and sorting still require manual labor, which cannot be truly'unmanned' . This means that the savings of the unmanned store is at best the cost of the cashier, and this cost is precisely the lowest part of the retail industry. In first- and second-tier cities, the cashier's salary ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 yuan. However, unmanned stores have to install and maintain smart equipment, such as multiple video cameras, automatic identification devices, etc., and use artificial intelligence and big data to establish a complete operating system. This is the main source of money. Moreover, in cold stores that have lost artificial temperature, consumers have a very low repurchase rate after early adopters, which creates a vicious circle of low efficiency. Let's take an unmanned store as an example. The average monthly turnover is 20,000 yuan, and the gross profit is 25% at 5,000 yuan. There is basically no room for profit after deducting operating expenses. Unshakable Chinese consumption habits. The reason why unmanned convenience stores fell into the ordinary after a short period of freshness is largely because unmanned stores are just a concept store and do not bring a better shopping experience. It is also impossible to change the consumption habits of customers. Since the establishment of Taobao in 2003, the Chinese have gradually shifted their consumption habits to online shopping. In 2018, the annual online shopping scale was close to 10 trillion. Under the ravages of online shopping, physical stores that can provide shopping experience have become less popular, not to mention unmanned convenience stores that have emerged in a short period of time. In the end, it is not surprising that the unmanned store has become a science and technology experiment field. As we said above, within a year, 138 unmanned retail companies were involved. Most of the small and medium-sized start-ups swarmed into the market and jumped down. Finally, they found that Ali and Tencent just tried the water and stopped, but they were stuck in mud and unable to jump out. Take Ali’s first unmanned supermarket as an example. It is just a pop-up store that has existed for four days at the Taobao Creation Festival. Once the time comes, it will completely disappear offline. Take Tencent's unmanned store as an example. It is either an internal store in the park or a pop-up store. These two giants have always been very conservative in the exploration of unmanned stores, but the vast number of entrepreneurs who don't know the truth are full of studs stupidly. Unmanned stores are destined to be a long-term game between giants about technology and capital. Those small and medium-sized entrepreneurs who are dumbfounded will inevitably become victims in the process of exploring business models.