46CHINA TODAY
By ZHAO HAIMEI & NING DI
Small Stores, No Small Deal
eConomy / new visTas
西安新东方学校
F
OR the past 10 years, Li and his wife have made a living by run-ning a small noodle restaurant comprising only three tables. Li left his hometown as a teenager in 2008, and worked on odd jobs in various regions before opening this 10-square-meter store in 2011.
At about every morning, he gets up to prepare the dough and make the noodles. When he finishes, cus-tomers begin to show up. Normally, he rves customers till around or a bit later. Sometimes Li envies tho who can finish work earlier. He admits that running a small business is not easy, but the upside is more flexibility: he can leave the post whenever there are urgent family affairs to attend to.
The Lis are an epitome of the 200 mil-lion Chine who operate more than 80 million small stores around the country. As humble as they are, the small busi-ness convey the ambition of young entrepreneurs, provide a stable living for couples who aspire to ttle down after hopping from one temporary job to an-other, and enliven communities, towns, and cities.
Surviving a Time of Fast Changes
In 2019 Du opened an 80-square-me-ter convenience store in eastern Beijing. The annual rent is RMB 400,000, and he spent an additional RMB 200,000 on dec-
oration and stocking. The cost has not
Customers lining up at a coffee shop in Xuhui District, Shanghai, to get their coffee rved by a furry bear claw through a hole in the wall on December 3, 2020. The café is now an Internet celebrity.
An attendant lling food at a food stall in the scenic Banbian Street of Shushan District, Hefei of Anhui Province.
47
新视野大学英语1课后答案
February 2021
yet been recovered due to the pandemic. Du has been in the convenience store business in Beijing for nearly 30 years. His last store was at Dongzhimen, one of the busiest pasnger depots in the city. The big crowds coming in and out of the region everyday brought him good business. However, he had to move out after the lea was terminated due to a
renovation project in the region.
His current store is located by resi-dential areas, so its customers are mostly local residents who come for groceries after work. They often exchange a few words with Du when checking out, a moment Du enjoys as a member of the local community.大学生人际交往
Within a diameter of one kilometer there are two more convenience stores. To stay ahead in the competition, Du looks every day for new ways to attract customers, especially the young genera-tion. When a fried chicken store opened next door, he t up two barrels of beer in his shop, thinking young people who buy fried chicken would love to grab some beer to go with it.
Du also thought of redesigning the space. “The layout is too conrvative,”
he complained, looking to the crammed shelves. Joining a franchi might have brought about the change he yearned for, he once thought, but he dropped the idea when learning that membership fee is a whopping RMB 800,000.
“At my age, I am not as creative as young people,” he said. Though he un-derstands that to change the old image of being a quaint mom-and-pop neigh-borhood store, he needs to hire a profes-sional team to reinvent the décor and management, but the cost is too much for him to bear. He also considered opening more stores, but hesitated out of worry for lea uncertainties brought about by district gentrification, which is prevalent in Chine cities.
According to Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and coauthor of New Infrastructure, New Engine of Chine Economy , conve-n
ience stores primarily rve residents of neighboring communities. They there-fore should carry out a thorough study of the needs of their target customers, and accordingly find their niche in the mar-ket. What’s more, they should develop their own features: if their commodities are largely the same as tho of their competitors, they can stand out with distinctive décor, historical relevance, or cultural ambience.
Fu Yifu, a rearcher with Suning Institute of Finance, obrves that small stores are on the cour of digitaliza-tion. For owners of brick-and-mortar shops, this means more entrants need to establish a digital system, transfer to the digital mode of stocking, tallying, and retailing, and learn the know-how in digital operation.
Partners of Two Generations
Young entrepreneurs are often found behind the small stores with great fame online. They understand the power of the
Internet and know how to harness it.
More entrants need to es-tablish a digital system, transfer to the digital mode of stocking, tallying, and re-tailing, and learn the know-how in digital operation.morningpost
48CHINA TODAY
eConomy / new visTas
Ah Yan, in his 20s, was formerly em-ployed in the IT industry. At the end of 2018, he opened a barbecue bar as a gathering ground for his friends. He was prepared for loss in the first six months, but to his surpri, the bar became a nsation from the very first month. The reason; a person running a popular food blog noticed the bar, and recommended it to their many followers. Immediately customers flocked in. By
the fourth month Ah Yan had recovered
the investment of RMB 300,000. “I was so busy (receiving customers) that often I could not find the time to have a drink with my friends before they had to leave,” he said.
Ah Yan has a partner from his home-town in northeastern China, a chef whom he calls Brother Bao. While Ah Yan was occupied with his IT job, Bao would tend the bar. Bao, in his 40s, has managed four stores. Now his wife runs their small supermarket, and he attends
the other three – a flower shop, a barbe-cue bar, and a souvenir store. He spends most of the day in his flower shop, and prepares the barbecue when he has time. Starting at about he ts up flower arrangements in the bar, which beautify the space, and are also open for orders from customers. When business is low during rainy days, Bao makes arts and crafts for sale. “I don’t like to idle around. I want to create more value with my skills,” he explained.
As people of two different genera-tions, Ah Yan and Brother Bao don’t always e eye to eye on everything in their business. For instance, Bao argues the bar should provide as much food as possible to appeal to more customers; while Ah Yan insists it should focus on a narrower range of foods that it is best at. The difference also lies in their devo-tion to the store, which was a side busi-n
ess for Ah Yan but a main occupation for Bao. With a stable income from his IT job, Ah Yan was not so concerned about the bar’s performance. This is why he clod it for three days during last year’s National Day holiday, known as the golden week for the catering industry, to travel out of the city. Bao, by contrast, cannot get KPI (Key Per-formance Indicator) out of his mind for even a moment. Small business own-ers like him always try to make more money to cover the rent and their staff ’s salary, and to create more profits for themlves. They are therefore in per-petual fear: fear for failure when busi-ness slumps and fear for unsustainable success when business booms.
Last August Ah Yan quit his IT job to be fully committed to the bar. He plans to open another startup or try other jobs after its business improves. “Running this eatery probably won’t consume all my energy.”
usheredDifference Sells
It is difficult maintaining one’s own中考英语听力
A man operating a breakfast stand near the Confucius Temple in Nanjing on New Year’s Day of 2021. The region attracts hordes of tourists all year round.
unique features in fierce competition. Ah Yan drew up various plans for his barbecue bar before deciding on one. At first he thought of modeling it after the native Beijing style, like other small business in Nanluoguxiang, a tour-ist district in central Beijing known for traditional courtyard homes in narrow, winding alleys. When durian cake was all the rage last year, he noticed many stores in the main street near his bar rved it. But he finally decided his bar doesn’t have to follow the trend. Unlike his peers in the main street, he caters to repeat customers.
“People-to-people connection is a rarity nowadays,” Ah Yan said. He hopes his bar can create this connection. “Cus-tomers e we are busy, and exchange a few words with us from time to time. We recognize each other during their later visits. This feels great.” A man from Tian-jin, 130 kilometers away from Beijing, comes to the bar regularly, sometimes three times a week. And some others take taxis here from the other end of the city, paying more on the drive than the food. “They come for a n of belong-ing,” Bao added.
It is common that stores in tour-
ist sites and commercial districts ll identical goods that are often from the same sources, such as Yiwu, the largest distribution center of small commodities in China. To change this situation, Pan Heli
n suggests an integrated production and marketing system for gifts tailor-made for specific tourist sites. It can come in the form of a digital platform on which store owners prent their de-mands for desired products. After the demands from different retailers in the same region are assorted by the platform, the information is nt to manufacturers to order for gifts of local features. Zhou Shengkai from Zhejiang Prov-ince opened a custom T-shirt store in Nanluoguxiang after noticing that most such T-shirts sold at tourist sites lack ingenuity. “My motivation was to open a
store in a cosmopolitan city to dismi-
nate Chine culture among interna-
tional visitors,” he said.
But it is expensive to rent a storefront
in big cities, especially in commercial
districts and near tourist sites. It is not
rare that some business cannot make
enough profits to cover their rent and
soon clo. One store in Nanluoguxiang,
for instance, changed hands 38 times
in the space of 11 months. Struggling to
stay afloat, Zhou hopes the state could
provide policy support for business of
innovation in cultural products in tour-
ist resorts. He admitted that he might
clo his store if sales do not pick up in
the coming months.
“Stability and predictability of policies
are important for small store owners,”
said Wang Jingyi, a rearcher with the
Institute of Digital Finance, Peking Uni-
interpersonalversity. The proprietors often feel over-
looked by state policies. In addition to
rents and costs, they are also concerned
about policy changes.
Du, the convenience store owner,
hopes to find low-cost ways to learn how
to renovate small shops, and that the
local government could make it easier
for non-native lf-employed people like
him to pay social insurance.
In July 2020 veral central agencies
including the Ministry of Commerce is-
sued a document to promote the devel-
gg是什么意思 opment of small stores, aiming to build
1,000 districts of small shops with big
buzz and crowds. This ts higher de-
mands for policymakers in cities, as “big
buzz and crowds” are often associated
with poor sanitation and disorder. This
actually can be solved through coordi-
nated efforts by regulatory and supervi-
sory authorities, Wang said. C
ZHAO HAIMEI is an intern reporter and NING DI
is a reporter with China Youth Daily
混血儿英语
.“My motivation was to
open a store in a cosmo-
politan city to disminate
Chine culture among
international visitors.”gre词汇量要求
A grocery store owner dresd up in a traditional Chine robe greets customers on April 29, 2020, anticipating an increa of tourists in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province during the May Labor Holiday.
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February 2021
