Invested tens of millions, supermarket giants gathered together to learn from Pang Donglai

Wen| Tech Planet Lin Jing

Another supermarket giant has become an apprentice to Pang Donglai. Wumart Supermarket located on Xueqing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, has recently closed its store for renovation, and the store is under intensive renovation.

A Wumart employee revealed to Tech Planet that the new transfer store has more than 200 employees, and the age requirement is under 35 years old. Some unqualified old employees are assigned to nearby Wumart stores. In order to recruit people in the short term, Wumart human resources departments in other regions of Beijing are also supporting recruitment efforts.

Before Wumart joined the ranks of apprentices, there were more than a dozen regional supermarkets that had been successively adjusted and modified by Pang Donglai. However, until last year, well-known listed companies including Yonghui, BBK, and Zhongbai Group had gathered together to recruit Pang Donglai, attracting industry attention.

Yonghui, which has a size of thousands of stores, announced the list of the first batch of 20 stores to be revised at the beginning of this year after 41 stores completed the restructuring of Pangdonglai last year. Yonghui also disclosed data that the profit dividends of employees in Pangdonglai’s modified store in January exceeded 10 million yuan, and the minimum income of front-line employees in some stores exceeded 8000 yuan in January.

This massive apprenticeship in the retail industry has once again made Pang Donglai, an Internet celebrity supermarket located in Xuchang, Henan Province, be praised as a shrine.

Invest tens of millions of dollars to join the Internet celebrity supermarket

Zhang Wenzhong, the head of Wumart, is known in the industry as the father of China supermarkets, and Yonghui once had a market value of 100 billion yuan at its peak. Their stores are all over the country and were once invincible, but now they bend down and become an apprentice to Pang Donglai.

In Xilongduo, Shijingshan District, Beijing, an eye-catching slogan for Beijing’s happiest supermarket was made and played continuously on the screen outside the mall.

This is Yonghui’s first modified store in Beijing to learn from Pang Donglai. However, users who want to buy Pang Donglai’s self-operated products will probably not feel happy, because there are only three rows of shelves in the store are marked with DL self-operated products, including juice, cooking oil, towels, etc. There is also a large area where Pang Donglai’s philosophy of life contains books containing daily essays by Yu Donglai, the founder of Pang Donglai.

After September last year, Pangdonglai’s supermarket model for restructuring and restructuring changed. Prior to this, Pangdonglai transferred internal procurement, operations, stores and other departments for the restructuring and restructuring of many supermarket stores under BBK, Yonghui, and Zhongbai Group. Employees went to the restructuring and restructuring of stores. Now, these supermarkets send a team to Pangdong to study and make adjustments on their own after returning.

Yonghui already has two Pangdonglai stores in Beijing. In early February, two stores in Fangshan District and Daxing District also entered the closed store. Coupled with the first modified store of Wumart Supermarket, it means that there will soon be five Pangdonglai supermarkets in Beijing.

The strategies for independent adjustment and modification of these stores are basically the same, including employee benefits such as salary increases and shortened working hours, as well as several dimensions such as product shelves and broadening store channels.

Taking the product structure as an example, it can be seen from Yonghui’s first transformation and modification store that the number of items removed from the shelves is 11430, accounting for 79% of the total. The number of re-planned items was 12765, with new items accounting for 76.2%. The similarity of the product structure after sorting reached more than 90% of that of Pangdonglai’s product structure.

An Yonghui employee introduced to Tech Planet that the transformation shop learned the management methods of Fat Donglai and sold Yonghui products. For example, the most popular baking area and deli area only sell products produced on the same day, including online celebrity beef jerky, small red sausage and other similar products from Pangdonglai, all of which are local producers in Beijing.

In the baking area, Pang Donglai’s same walnut cheese buns, taro milk buns and other products were also made by the noodle chef from Yonghui Store who went to Pang Donglai’s central kitchen to learn the formula and came back to make them.

A Yonghui employee revealed to Tech Planet that because a reorganization store involves store renovation, employee salary improvement, and product structure readjustment, the investment cost of a single store is not low, about tens of millions of yuan.

Previously, when Pang Donglai’s team helped Jiabile Supermarket in Hubei, it also disclosed data that founder Yu Donglai seconded 30 million yuan from Pang Donglai, which solved the funding needed for Jiabile’s adjustment and reform at that time. problem.

In the transfer and transformation stores, the upper age limit for employees has also been unified to 35 years old. In addition to forming a younger team, an employee of Yonghui transfer and transformation store introduced that it also considered that the workload of the transfer and transformation store is too large, and young people can meet the requirements.

B noodles from Pang Donglai

In Beijing Yonghui’s first transformation shop, you can see everywhere the imitation of Fat Donglai ‘s corporate beliefs of love and freedom.

Various happy supermarkets, red banners and slogans that make employees happy and customers happy are hung in different areas. In a letter to customers at the door, this supermarket also apologized for its immature management in the past and its failure to bring real products.

In the cooked food, fruit, and baking areas that need to be cut, the warning signs all read that most of us are new employees, our skills are not yet mature, and our service is not enough to ask customers to understand.

In the view of a Yonghui employee, the biggest change in the transformation store is the service for customers. For example, there is a transparent glass window behind the fruit cuts, so customers can clearly see the product making process. After the fruit cuts are packaged, the products will be discounted to varying degrees during different times of 1 hour, 4 hours and 6 hours because the freshness of the products is impaired.

In the years when the retail industry was booming, scale, profit and ultimate efficiency were placed first in the mainstream Internet narrative. Yonghui and BBK were all top performers in this industry context.

But now, with the price impact brought by e-commerce, emerging business formats such as discount stores, fresh food stores, and snack collection stores are emerging one after another, leaving offline supermarkets with increasingly narrow living space. Pang Donglai has become popular on the Internet because of its service, product quality, and employee benefits, and has been regarded as the industry standard in this development cycle.

But the grassroots employees who are among them can best understand the other side of this adjustment and reform.

At the end of last year, Wang Yao, under the mobilization of the department head, moved from the original Yonghui store to a nearby transformation store. In his words, he didn’t know what overtime was before, but now he can do endless work with his eyes open.

The Yonghui transfer store where he works happens to open during the Spring Festival. At its best, the daily sales reached 1.8 million yuan. At the end of the day, he can only sell shelf boards.

Compared with cashier, customer service and other positions, the employees in the store are the most tired. Wang Yao said that during the Chinese New Year, he worked an average of 15 hours a day from 8:30 in the morning to 2:00 in the morning, because stores required stores to close and reach the level of opening, constantly replenishing goods, holding meetings, and reordering.

Since Pangdonglai stores are only located in Xuchang and Xinxiang in Henan Province, these modified stores will attract surrounding residents to check in and snap up Pangdonglai’s self-operated products in the early stages of opening, and employees will enter their busiest moments.

But when passenger flow stabilized, what made Wang Yao feel even more frustrating was that supermarkets began to strengthen the assessment of five-color cards, specifically yellow cards, red cards, green cards, white cards and blue cards. Behind each card is corporate culture, employee manners, product labels, product tasting, etc. Employees will be randomly inspected and assessed at any time on site or during meetings. If they fail, corresponding points will be deducted.

According to Wang Yao, employee salary consists of basic salary + bonus. If 10 points are deducted, the bonus will be halved. When a place failed to qualify, the most he heard the store manager say was, Look at what Pang Donglai did.

However, in the view of Wang Yao and many other employees of Yonghui Adjustment and Reform Store, this is impossible to compare. For example, in Beijing, the salary of employees in the transfer and transformation store has increased from 4000 yuan/month to more than 6000 yuan/month, which is not prominent in the salary level of first-tier cities. In contrast, the average salary of employees in Pangdonglai in Xuchang has reached 9000 yuan/month.

In essence, behind Pang Donglai’s corporate culture of love and freedom is that in third-and fourth-tier cities with lower costs such as rent, salaries and holiday benefits far higher than local levels can be provided to drive these employees to implement various strict service rules, online and opened Pang Donglai’s employee manual, which has as many as 85000 pages.

In the past, due to product quality problems, Pang Donglai either released dozens of pages of investigation reports or compensated customers 9 million yuan, which also pushed the company to break through.

Is it easy to be an apprentice from Pang Donglai?

For these supermarket giants, is it easy to be apprentices from the fat east through this independent adjustment model?

What employees can feel most directly is the increase in sales and the increase in young consumer groups. A Yonghui employee revealed to Tech Planet that taking her new first-tier city store as an example, the daily sales volume of the store used to be 100,000 yuan. Now, after three months of adjustment, the daily sales volume can now remain at around 340,000 yuan.

However, in the stores that Pang Donglai initially adjusted in the name of assistance, self-operated products were one of the stabilizing factors driving supermarket sales. For example, BBK Meixi Lake Store once disclosed that based on average daily sales, the sales of Pangdonglai’s private-brand products account for almost one-third of BBK Supermarket.

However, in September last year, Yu Donglai stated to the public that for the normal work and life of Pangdonglai employees, all technologies and methods could be taught in the subsequent restructuring of the company, but no team would be dispatched to the stores to provide on-site assistance.

In other words, these stores now have to explore their own experience and replicate it. Reducing the supply of self-operated products is also to reduce the dependence of modified stores on fat Donglai.

After all, self-operated products are an important traffic code for these stores to receive customers. Taking Beijing Yonghui’s first modified store as an example, users must register for Yonghui Life membership before they can make purchases.

Even because Yonghui launched similar self-operated products, some customers had a dissatisfied experience. They said on social platforms that Yonghui’s self-operated products such as laundry detergent and oatmeal to fruit juice, Yonghui’s self-operated products have also produced similar products. The packaging design and price are almost the same, and they are placed on the former’s shelves, confusing many consumers. They traveled all the way and felt that they had bought a fake.

But for these apprentices, Pang Donglai is still a life-saving straw.

Before they became masters, their performance was almost on the edge of a cliff. After falling into continuous losses, in October last year, BBK was also subject to bankruptcy review. Yonghui Supermarket has suffered a total loss of nearly 10 billion yuan in the past four years.

Compared with changing fate through adjustment and change, Yu Donglai once said about the results of the adjustment and change,”Don’t think about how much money you will earn when you change the store at the beginning. As long as you don’t lose money, you can sell it for 400,000 yuan a day. It’s very happy.

An employee of Fat Donglai told Tech Planet that this is in line with Donglai’s consistent personal characteristics and only talks about concepts. Just like in multiple public live broadcasts, he rarely talks about specific business strategies, scale and profits, and 90% of the time is spent talking about his feelings and thoughts about love and freedom.

But for Shangchao, which is mired in losses, it may be difficult not to worry about how long the explosive effect of the adjustment will last.

In the view of a Yonghui employee, Pangdonglai only has 13 offline stores, but now these supermarkets often adjust dozens of stores a year. The most test is whether the service and product quality can keep up. After all, if it could be easily copied, Pang Donglai would have opened stores intensively across the country.

(Note: Wang Yao is a pseudonym in the article.)