Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"oversupply" has always been the biggest crux of shopping malls in China.

If you want to say which shopping mall I have the most feelings for, it should be Chaoyang Dayue City. Many years ago, I was still hanging out in the area of Youth Road in Beijing. When I got paid, I couldn't help but go to Chaoyue to find a restaurant to fight for teeth.

I believe that many people, like me, often regard shopping malls as canteens. No matter where they live, they have to go to the surrounding shopping malls and scan the fourth or fifth floors to see if there is anything delicious.

In this issue, I would like to start with the development of shopping malls and talk about why the destination of Chinese shopping malls is the super canteen.

For a long time, retail in Europe was controlled by urban handicraft guilds. The guild restricts stores to sell only a single product, limits the number of stores in the same industry, and limits the price of goods to ensure sufficient profits.

It was not until the first industrial revolution brought an unprecedented wealth of goods to Europe, but also brought about changes in the way goods were sold.

As a commercial form, department store (department store) first appeared in the middle of the 19th century.

It's completely different from the store in the past. Department stores not only sell different categories and all kinds of goods, but also depress profits, speed up the turnover rate of goods, and make small profits and quick turnover.

The retail revolution soon shifted from Europe to the United States, Australia, Japan and China.

At the end of the 19th century, British and Chinese businessmen set up department stores in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Modern retailing has begun to take root in China.

The shopping center is a further product on the basis of the department store.

In 1956, a commercial complex called Southdale Center was completed in the town of Edina on the outskirts of Minneapolis.

At a cost of $20 million, Southdale includes 72 stores, including two large department stores as main tenants.

The interior is divided into two floors, with escalators and a huge parking lot with air conditioning in summer and heating in winter. In the middle of the building, there is a huge garden atrium covered with transparent skylights for customers to enjoy and rest.

And unlike the shops along the street in the past, Southdale is very introverted, it is like a big box, all the shop windows and entrances face only the interior sidewalk.

Many researchers believe that Southdale is the first real shopping center in the world. Its box-like closed design, multi-storey building structure, and the combination of main and auxiliary tenant investment model all laid a template for shopping malls all over the United States.

Even for a long time, almost every shopping mall in the United States had a garden courtyard under the skylight.

After Southdale, the trend of retail business in the world began to shift from department stores to shopping centers.

02 here, it is necessary for us to clarify the concept of what is a shopping mall, or what is the difference between it and a traditional department store?

Although both are places for shopping and consumption, the business models of the two are fundamentally different.

In the past, when I went shopping in a department store, there was a detail, that is, when paying, the clerk would give you a list and ask you to pay at the cashier.

Behind this is because the core business model of department stores is the very traditional purchase-sell model.

The counters in the store are jointly operated by brands and department stores, which make a profit from the sales revenue. Therefore, it is necessary to unify the collection and settlement.

But the mall is more of a landlord business, that is, renting out shops to collect rent. Therefore, for operators, how to gather popularity and make consumers willing to come shopping is the focus of the operation.

Because of the difference in the basic business model, there are also various differences in the mode of operation between the two.

A more obvious difference is that the category of each floor of the department store is often relatively single, with jewelry and makeup on the first floor, women's wear on the second floor, men's wear on the third floor, children on the fourth floor, and sports on the fifth floor. This kind of distribution is more beneficial for consumers to find the goods they want and promote the maximization of sales.

The ability of the shopping center is to attract investment, through the configuration of the format combination, the configuration of the primary and secondary stores and unified planning and publicity management, maximize the attractiveness of the existing store resources, thus receiving a higher amount of store rent.

So Nike on the first floor of the mall may be next to Starbucks, and next to the MUJI on the second floor may be Xiaomi. Through the diversification of business formats, rational allocation of brands, for customers to create a better "shopping" experience, to form a stronger attraction to consumers.

In addition, the furnishings of department stores are often counter-style, and the use of space is also relatively intensive. This design is also sales-oriented.

Shopping centers are often store-style, and each brand has its own independent space, which can be decorated according to the needs of the brand.

The space density of shopping centers is often relatively low, and even leave a lot of landscape and leisure space. Although the utilization rate of space is low, the shopping experience of consumers will be enhanced and can also play a role in gathering guests.

The third and most fundamental difference. Shopping malls are bound to coexist in multiple formats, including retail, catering, entertainment, education, parent-child and other forms of business.

Nowadays, in many shopping malls, the proportion of catering, retail and entertainment is often 1:1:1. In traditional department stores, although there will be a certain form of catering and entertainment, but retail sales are absolutely dominant.

03 returned to China. As early as the mid-1990s, with the completion of Tianhe City Square in Guangzhou as a symbol, real shopping malls began to appear in China.

But the real start of a large-scale mall movement is already after the 2008 financial crisis.

According to the 2022 Shopping Center Development report, the stock area of shopping malls in China soared from less than 100 million square meters to nearly 500 million square meters from 2011 to 2021, and the growth rate was more than 20 percent until 2018.

Almost half of the world's new shopping malls completed every year are in China.

And the single shopping center is getting bigger and bigger. In the early days, a shopping center with an area of more than 50,000 square meters was considered very large. Nowadays, it is common for shopping malls to reach 300,000 square meters. According to the Shanghai Shopping Centers Association, 90% of the new shopping centers opened in Shanghai in 2020 are more than 50, 000 square meters.

In my opinion, the mall movement itself is mainly a by-product of China's rapid real estate industry.

The mall movement is driven not only by the growing spending power and shopping demand of consumers, but also by the supply-side development needs of the real estate industry.

Therefore, "oversupply" has been the biggest crux of China's shopping malls for a long time.

According to the Zhongcheng Business Research Institute, in the first half of 2020, the average vacancy rate of typical shopping malls across the country (vacant space / total berth area) exceeded the industry-recognized 20% warning line, reaching 21.10.

This year, the problem of high vacancy rate in shopping malls remains unsolved.

In the first half of 2022, the average vacancy rate of shopping malls in 12 key cities across the country reached 13.4%, according to data from Wengshang.com. In Shanghai, the vacancy rate of shops in Zhengda Square, once known as "the first Mall in China", is now as high as 34%, while that of Shimao Square in the business district of people's Square is more than 20%.

If there is an oversupply, it is natural to find someone to pick up the offer.

In fact, in the early days of the rise of shopping malls, catering was not that important.

The reason is also very simple, you can't eat more than one restaurant at a meal, right? Catering is a very purposeful format, it is not suitable for shopping, if you are not going to eat, then no matter how many restaurants in the shopping mall are meaningless to you.

Therefore, as a supplementary form of catering, it can only be placed on the B1 or the top floor of the shopping center, as the end of the passenger flow.

A more recognized golden ratio is shopping, catering, entertainment at 5:2:3.

In addition, the threshold of the catering industry is not high, gross profit is not as high as makeup, clothing, jewelry. In general, the reasonable rent-to-sales ratio of food and beverage stores is maintained between 30% and 35%, so it is difficult to afford the space rent to eat up too much profit space, so except for brands with landmark nature and drainage value such as Starbucks, general catering brands seldom rent those "gold shops".

Come to think of it, if any restaurant can afford to rent a main berth in a shopping mall, the value of the mall is generally not much higher.

So why has the catering industry become the thigh business of shopping malls?

It must be that there are no tigers in the mountains. Retail is really too hard to fight.

Looking back over the past decade, the construction of shopping malls has coincided with the advent of the era of e-commerce in China. Tmall, JD.com and pinduoduo have risen one after another and become giant companies. Independent e-commerce, cross-border e-commerce, live e-commerce various e-commerce models have dominated the industry.

The development of e-commerce has dealt a fatal blow to offline retail.

One feature that can be seen is that in the past few years, the shopping malls with the most prosperous life are almost dominated by luxury goods. The reason is also very simple: luxury goods are not easily replaced by e-commerce, and they are also the most robust category in the overall consumer market.

So, retail can not play, why not make up for leisure and entertainment?

The reason is similar to retail, where the richness of online entertainment has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. Mobile game e-sports, long and short videos, social networks have swallowed up a lot of time, but also solved a lot of entertainment needs. By contrast, the cinemas and game halls in shopping malls are not so interesting and the cost is too high.

To calculate, only catering, such a strong offline, strong real-time format, is the most difficult to be defeated by mobile phones.

By the way, it is educational institutions that have propped up many small shopping malls over the past many years. They not only contribute their own rent, but also play a strong role in drainage.

After all, when a child goes to class, the whole family has to go to the mall. Grandparents don't go to a supermarket? Mom doesn't get a beauty pedicure? Dad, don't you want to see the new energy car? Even if none of these are available, it is always possible to have a light meal nearby at the mall.

Of course, apart from the lack of strength from peers, catering itself also has some advantages.

First of all, although the profitability of the catering industry is average, it is a sharp tool for drainage. That is, it brings its own passenger flow, which can attract a large number of customers who come "for dinner" and let them go shopping by the way.

And because the catering drainage ability is strong, so it does not choose the location of the shop. For the moving line design of shopping malls, the top and bottom floors are often dead corners and passenger flow depressions. Putting food and beverage in these positions can effectively solve the problem of insufficient passenger flow.

Secondly, compared with other retail formats, the catering operation mode is relatively simple, the training period is shorter, and the cash flow is fast. For shopping malls, even the introduction of big brands, often take a period of time to "maintain". But the big names of food and beverage often work as soon as they are recruited.

Especially because the threshold of building a brand is low, it is easy to give birth to a popular style IP, which brings a strong topic effect in the short term.

Over the years, from tea to tea color, from cobbled together to senior officials, from cheesecake to Chinese baking. There are always some online celebrity brands appear every year. For shopping malls, as long as you keep up with the wave, it is a solid traffic dividend.

Third, the restaurant format is often able to bear a long lease, as well as a large rental area.

Generally in shopping malls, the rental area of catering projects is about 300 to 500 square meters, and the contract period can often reach 5 to 8 years, which is obviously attractive for shopping malls to attract investment.

06 since I just graduated, my own income has increased several times in recent years. But whenever I go to the mall, I still can't buy brands that I couldn't afford at that time. Shopping in high-end shopping malls that felt stressful at that time is still not easy.

Shopping picture is a happy, the picture is picky happiness. But if there are brands everywhere that you can't afford at all, what else can you gain from shopping but anxiety?

Maybe, just harvest a meal.

A simple truth is that having a good meal is almost one of the most cost-effective things that can give us a sense of satisfaction.

What kind of happiness can more than one hundred yuan give you in the shopping mall today?

The answer is to eat.

This may also be one of the reasons why shopping malls have become large canteens.

Reference:

The catering industry accounts for nearly 40%, and the "end point" of large shopping malls is the food mall. "Nanjing Daily

"want to open a restaurant in the mall? Here are three location techniques "Gu Liang"

"the mall is dying? Where is the way of food and beverage in the future?

"Why are all retail brands in shopping malls? "Lu Ming Finance and Economics

"Chinese Shopping Mall: on the practice of Commercial Real Estate" Yu Lai

"The Terrazzo Jungle" The New Yorker

"The Death And Rebirth of the American Mall" Smithsonian Magazine

Mall and More: from Paris Department Store to "garbage Space" and "Urban China"

The "2022 Shopping Center Development report" wins the business network.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: IC Lab (ID:InsightPlusClub)

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