A few months ago, Lei Hu received his year-end bonus, but it was only half of last year's. After asking, everyone was cut in half. Unhappy, Lei Hu was worried that he was sitting on a sinking ship, so he decisively chose to resign and decided to find a better future. Half a month ago, Lei Hu finally went to work. After asking, he returned to the original company. When the news of the convenience bee raising the year-end bonus against the trend came out, Lei Hu sighed infinitely, and he felt more and more that he could not understand the world in . Some companies disappeared as they were doing it. The flowers and applause were obviously yesterday, but in a blink of an eye, the building was empty. Some people were chased by headhunter yesterday, and turned around and could not find a job even if they cut their salary. Some companies can also increase their salary against the trend. What went wrong?
01
Convenience Bee who is raising salary against the trend
He Xi posted a Weibo at the end of last year, and his complaints about the career path of media people finally turned into a 10w+ article by Jiang Chacha last month, "PR-Media-AIA-WeChat, this is the real career path! 》 quickly flooded the market's public relations circle, and workplace anxiety was once again ignited. All glory and dreams were ultimately defeated by frequent personnel adjustments in the Internet industry.
When the overall environment began to adjust, Convenience Bee increased its salary against the trend, and it has to be said to be an outlier.
htmlOn June 6, Titanium Media sent a message, which roughly means "The headquarters employees of Convenience Bee received an unexpected surprise." Convenience Bee’s Human Resources Department issued an email to all employees, announcing that last year’s year-end bonus will be issued on the 13th of this month. Nearly half of employees will also receive additional bonus incentives. With the newly established half-year award, star employees with S-level performance will be able to get 20 salaries throughout the year.
In addition, the stock rewards promised at the beginning of the year have also been distributed at the end of May, and there are also shares of the theater managers on the front line of the store and fresh graduates who have just entered the year. All benefits and surprises in have nothing to do with qualification level, is a privilege of all "star employees".
This is almost an inclusive reward. When the overall environment begins to adjust and some competitors are shut down and transfer, Convenience Bee does this, in addition to indicating that the company's operating conditions are good and cash flow is abundant, it must have other intentions. combined with another news from Convenience Bee at the beginning of the year and a data released by CCFA, perhaps, we can find more.
02
cycle: lipstick effect
2011, Howard Max mentioned in "The Most Important Things in Investing ", "Recognizing that market fluctuations must have cycles are crucial to investment." It seems that he is still unsatisfied. Eight years later, "Cycle" was published, and Howard used a whole book to discuss the topic of "Cycle".
Market fluctuations have their own cycles. Some cycles are at the same frequency as the general environment, while others are opposite to the general environment. The lipstick effect is a typical example. Whenever the economy adjusts, the sales of lipstick will rise against the trend. In industries with similar properties as - such as the entertainment industry - will also have similar situations, as are convenience stores under the new retail model. Why does this happen in
? In economics, this phenomenon is called the "favorable trend of low-priced products", and simply put it is "inexpensive beauty". The low price here does not mean low quality.
For example, Melissa is a big fan of Starbucks. After witnessing a round of layoffs in the company, she began to drink convenience bee coffee instead. As a heavy user of coffee, Melissa knows very well that between , whether it is raw materials or coffee maker, is actually a level of things. used to guard Starbucks with a little pride, but after getting used to drinking the convenience bee, I found that my good feelings were not discounted.
When the environment is adjusted, consumers' own consumption desire has not disappeared, but is becoming more and more rational. dare not spend big money easily. As a result, a lot of "little money" suddenly appeared in the market, and "little money" in the end were spent on "inexpensive beauty", such as lipstick. Behind the lipstick effect is high-frequency daily consumption, and convenience stores are one of the scenarios.
CCFA recently released the "2018 Top 100 Chinese Chain Chain List" shows that among the top 100 companies whose sales and store count declined in 2018, half of the companies whose main business is department stores, while the sales scale and store growth of convenience stores have begun to lead other business formats. so we can see some convenience stores closing and revolving, but the overall data has grown strongly.
With the continuous investment in innovative products and technologies by convenience stores, convenience stores closer to consumers have become more and more powerful in their attributes of "inexpensive beauty" and have become the first choice for urban white-collar workers and the 500 million new middle class in daily consumption, and even become the "urban kitchen".
Executive Vice President of Beijing Society of Business Economics Lai Yang said that "When local convenience stores open 'urban kitchen', it is undoubtedly a good time for today's Chinese market. Perhaps the future convenience stores will present completely different themes according to different locations and time periods, focusing on different styles of food, with data support and emotional experience."
Today's China is highly similar to Japan, with aging population, a sharp increase in small families, and a batch of empty-nest youth. These are all fertile soil for convenience stores to survive. The aging population puts higher demands on the convenience of shopping, and the emergence of small families has made daily purchases tend toward products with small quantity and high price, so why young people don’t buy refrigerators have become a topic.
So, back to the beginning of 2019, Convenience Bee Internal Letter shows that the number of stores will exceed 1,000 in 2019. Currently, there are more than 700 Convenience Bee stores, and 711 has only opened 200 stores after 14 years of use. Behind the counter-trend salary increase in is the rapid growth of Convenience Bee's overall business, which is also preparing for the future.
03
Why is Convenience Bee
When we see the Convenience Bee sing for rapid progress, we should also see that in the second half of last year, due to the explosion of Shanlin Capital, Neighbor Convenience Store was closed overnight in 168 stores in Beijing.
Driven by the lipstick effect, the convenience store industry has indeed seen rapid growth, but it is still a few happy and sad. So we must ask, why is it a convenience bee? Convenience Bee has opened more than 700 stores in the past two years. The store opening speed in 2018 is 10 times that in 2017. The total number of stores will exceed 1,000 in 2019. Why can Convenience Bee achieve rapid growth?
Reviewing the establishment of Convenience Bee, we can find that this is a company with strong planning and rhythm, and what follows is a kind of stability. It can also be seen from the pace of opening a store that Convenience Bee took a long time to debug the market and operations, and only began to expand after everything matured, rather than blindly starting a high-speed growth model.
New retail convenience stores seem to be a battle of scale and entrance, but in fact they are a battle of products and supply chains. These are by no means a matter of overnight success. The importance of offline new retail is this place, so it took a year and a half to open the first 200 stores of Convenience Bee. has been spent this year and a half on product polishing, supply chain integration and data algorithms, and these are all hard work.
Take the supply chain as an example. Convenience Bee heavily involved in the supply chain and has invested heavily in building exclusive cooperative factories, from production sources to logistics and distribution to store sales, and strong monitoring, dataization and online throughout the process.
The "data-driven operation" built on the product and supply chain is the core of Convenience Bee. Through the independently developed convenience store operation system, Convenience Bee has achieved global digitalization of its business.
Take food safety as an example. In order to ensure the safe delivery of processed food to the store, Convenience Bee has installed a GPS and Bluetooth thermometer on its cold chain logistics vehicle, which can monitor the temperature in the car in real time in the background. If an abnormality is found, it will automatically alarm, and the food will be discarded immediately or rejected by the store.
In addition, domestic convenience stores have been manually inspecting the expiration of goods, and there is a possibility of omission. Convenience Bee independently developed fresh PAD, which to a certain extent blocked artificial omissions and effectively solved food safety problems.
Take full-scale marketing as an example. Convenience Bee can complete the deployment in stores across the country in just 48 hours. Traditional convenience stores, including Japanese convenience stores with the highest operating level, will take several months to complete the deployment in stores across the country. Convenience stores are offline and more online. These are what Convenience Bee was doing in the year and a half. Efficiency is more important than speed.
Originally founder of "Nanfeng Window" and "First Financial Daily" and founder of "Qin Shuo Moments" wrote in an evaluation of Convenience Bee: "Online trends are facing blank markets. If you discover a new opportunity, you can quickly fly into the clouds. The offline physical space has long been densely distributed. Whether it is taking advantage of the situation or turning stones into gold to make transformations, it is impossible to achieve it overnight."
For Convenience Bee, Convenience Bee is not just a convenience store, but also a digital and online terminal entrance, a company that constantly generates data and is driven by data.
Look back at the salary increase again, it is clearly trying to seize the opportunity and do a big fight.
