When takeaway platforms frantically throw coins to compete for market share, milk tea and coffee have become the biggest winners of the subsidy war, but riders and merchants have collapsed in the flood of orders. This seemingly consumer carnival “instant retail war”, who will benefit in the end, and who will cry?
It is also a value to deliver services stably, maintain the smooth operation of the system, not create bubbles and involution in a single industry and field in the name of “strategy” and “competition”, and do not allow the system to exacerbate the contradiction between ordinary people and ordinary people, and not cause waste of resources.
Have you noticed recently that it is becoming easier and easier to overtime when ordering takeout recently.
A few days ago, I ordered a raw fry, using a large red envelope with a discount of 17.5 yuan for 18 yuan given by the flash sale, which is expected to be delivered within 40 minutes.
Unexpectedly, when the delivery boy called me, it was already an hour and a half later.
I talked to my friends and found that similar things happened not only to me, but also to Taobao flash sales.
Basically, they were attracted by the platform’s generous large red envelopes and placed orders, thinking that they would receive takeaway soon. Unexpectedly, by the time the little brother arrived, the person was already hungry and twisting and rolling on the ground and crawling in the dark.
On July 5, Taobao Flash Sale launched the first order rush day, known as “Super Saturday”. The platform took out resources at the level of Double 11 and joined forces with Ele.me to launch a subsidy war. Meituan immediately followed up, relaxed restrictions, and made every effort to subsidize.
After JD.com announced its entry into the takeaway market in a high-profile manner at the beginning of the year and launched a charge against Meituan, the takeaway market ushered in a new round of war, and Taobao did not even take tens of billions of subsidies in its eyes, but directly announced a subsidy of 50 billion yuan a year.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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This wave is no less than losing the Three Kingdoms War between Baidu Takeaway, Ele.me and Meituan.
But the major platforms are in full swing, and the subsidies are bloody. Consumers find that it is becoming more and more difficult to eat takeaway on time, the takeaway brother finds that he is deducted more and more overtime fees, and the merchant finds that the pressure to serve food is increasing.
What will be the result of this business war?
In this issue, let’s talk about the recent takeaway war.
01
An interesting phenomenon is that in this war, the subsidy approval orders actually flowed to the same category: milk tea and coffee.
According to Taobao’s official data, with Taobao’s flash sale offering a subsidy of 50 billion, the number of orders for coffee, drinks, and desserts has skyrocketed by more than 200%.
Although orders for traditional baking, porridge and pastries, Western fast food, rice fast food, rice noodles and other orders have also doubled, they are still slightly inferior to coffee and milk tea.
It can be said that milk tea and coffee have become the unexpected winner of this takeaway war.
Let’s first review the bloody single battle between Taobao and Meituan on July 5th.
On the same day, without receiving any notice and not having time to increase manpower, many catering businesses found that the platform began to pour subsidies.
In particular, milk tea merchants, the flock of orders has exploded the single machines of many milk tea shops.
Many milk tea shop clerks were faced with orders piled up several meters long and found that there were not enough manpower or materials, and they collapsed and cried on the spot. Many offline self-pickup consumers can’t wait for the meal to be served, so they directly choose to pick it up at will.
On the other side, on social networks, there is another joyful scene.
Countless consumers ridiculed that if the takeaway war does not stop, they will drink it to become diabetic.
Some people even took advantage of the cheapness to fill their refrigerators with milk tea and coffee.
So the question is, why is milk tea coffee exploding?
In fact, I have talked about this matter in an article before.
Whenever there is a takeaway subsidy war, the biggest beneficiary must be milk tea and coffee.
First of all, the unit price of the customer is low, it is originally nine yuan or more than 10 yuan, the platform subsidy point, the merchant pays a little blood, can reach three or four yuan or even one or two yuan, which is about the same as no money, and the order volume will go up.
The second is that the consumption elasticity is large, coffee and milk tea do not occupy the stomach, one cup a day is OK, with subsidies, adding another cup is just a slip away. Unlike fast food, even if you subsidize it, three meals a day is unlikely to become four meals a day.
As a result, as soon as the platform subsidized, milk tea exploded, and the blood sugar content of our consumers began to soar.
02
However, is the milk tea explosion really the result that the platform wants?
I’m afraid not, and it can even be said that milk tea is explosive, which is not in the interests of either party.
Let’s look at the platform first, whether it is JD.com, Meituan or Taobao, in fact, they all participate in the war in the name of flash sales or second delivery, and scatter red envelopes.
It’s not so much a takeaway war as it is a flash sale war or instant retail war.
The so-called instant retail, in one sentence, is “30 minutes to deliver everything”. It uses a takeaway delivery network to deliver all kinds of things that can only be bought in supermarkets or traditional e-commerce, which solves the immediate shopping needs of consumers.
In the past, when buying a mobile phone, it might take three to five days to arrive, but the next day it was considered fast.
When it comes to the instant retail war, the inventory of each offline store has become the SKU of the takeaway platform. If you want to buy a mobile phone, the courier brother can help you deliver it from the nearest Xiaomi Home or Huawei flagship store within an hour.
Such efficiency is terrifying.
Especially for traditional e-commerce companies such as JD.com and Taobao, if instant retail becomes popular, it means that the brick-and-mortar store merchants who were killed by them in the past may give them a shot back and even subvert the entire industry pattern.
Therefore, spending money into instant retail and cultivating user habits is both offensive and defensive.
Then, it is conceivable that if the orders go to milk tea, it is impossible to change the stereotype of “instant delivery = eat and drink”, and this subsidy will be gray.
Moreover, the price of milk tea and coffee is too low, and there are too many subsidies, which will lead to “increasing orders without increasing income”, and it is not cost-effective in business.
Just like JD.com’s takeaway began to break out in April, the number of orders is almost catching up with Ele.me’s volume, but because the proportion of milk tea and coffee is too high, it has not caused any substantial blow to Meituan, and Meituan’s transaction scale (GMV) still occupies 70% of the entire track, standing firm.
Take the data of “Super Saturday” and it will clearly illustrate the problem.
On the same day, Meituan’s total orders exceeded 120 million, and Taobao’s flash sale orders exceeded 80 million, and the platform burned out the ability of catering stores to serve meals, burned up the platform’s capacity, and allowed people across the country to place more than 50 million orders on this “crazy Saturday”.
But ironically, consumers first burst the milk tea shop, and then began to book takeaway in the next few days, and after the production capacity of the restaurant was full, they remembered that they could also buy all kinds of grains, oils, rice and noodles, frozen food, and home cleaning.
According to the data, Meituan’s non-catering instant retail transactions that day were only 20 million, and Taobao’s flash sale was only 13 million.
Only one-sixth of the orders were what the platforms wanted, and the rest deviated from the original strategic purpose.
In the end, consumers remembered that the original intention of flash sales was to let everyone buy things other than catering.
It can be said that this subsidy war, from the perspective of platform strategy, is to make up for loneliness.
03
If that’s the case, it’s not a big problem.
The real problem is the waste of capacity.
Everyone may feel that since the major platforms began to engage in subsidy wars, the punctuality rate of takeaway has begun to decrease. In the past, there were occasional early deliveries, but now it can be delivered at the latest time it is expected to arrive, even if it is good, it is very normal to be late for ten or twenty minutes.
So, where is this capacity?
Of course, it was still swallowed up by coffee milk tea.
In the time period without subsidies, coffee and milk tea can only be regarded as one of the many large categories on the takeaway platform, although the share is also large, but it cannot beat porridge, noodles, rice.
After all, the unit price is low, plus 300,000 milk tea shops across the country, very dense, if you want to drink, you can just move your legs to pick it up, and save a single freight.
But with subsidies, coffee and milk tea for three or four yuan have a devouring effect on takeaway capacity, which is comparable to cancer.
In fact, many media have reported that when JD.com and Taobao entered the takeaway war together, a side effect was that the takeaway brother and the milk tea clerk were all numb.
Think about it, the consumption elasticity of milk tea is indeed high, but whether it is Mixue Bingcheng, Gu Ming or Luckin, they are actually unable to withstand the surge in traffic.
The store is only a few square meters, and there are only one or two dining equipment, and the clerks have increased from one or two to three or five at most, and no matter how much they are, it is useless. With this elasticity of production capacity, it is impossible to digest the soaring order volume of five or ten times.
Then when the riders who come to pick up the order arrive at the store, they will find that their orders are far away, and all riders can only wait in line. A large amount of capacity is blocked in this link.
The more subsidies and the larger the number of orders, the more capacity will be blocked in this link.
This is also why, on the day of “Super Saturday” on July 5, many stores had to close their takeaway business, and some places gave a 10 yuan order rush reward in order to make up for the capacity, but they still couldn’t make up the gap.
Milk tea and coffee after being forcibly added by the platform are the cancer of takeaway.
And the capacity it devoured originally existed for us ordinary workers to eat three meals a day and eat on time.
You know, many ordinary workers may only have an hour of lunch break, and they have to take care of it, eat, take a nap, and sometimes need to socialize with colleagues.
Anyone who has worked in the CBD or a large park may have experienced that at noon, those affordable canteen fast food restaurants are bound to be overcrowded, and the queue alone may take a quarter of an hour.
If you really want to make the most efficient use of time, ordering takeout in advance is almost the best choice, you can get it before the lunch break, and you can sleep for half an hour after eating immediately, and you have the energy to cope with the second half of the day’s cattle and horse life.
But this matter is based on sufficient and stable capacity.
Once the takeaway is 15 minutes and a half hours late, the noon break plan will be in vain.
04
Nowadays, many media are talking about how convenient instant delivery is and how takeaway can change people’s lives, and I feel very confused.
Obviously, consumers are people with hands and feet, so why does the platform have to treat everyone like a giant baby at home, and everything must be served until they stay at home?
Later, I figured out that in the final analysis, our takeaway market is so developed that it is adapted to everyone’s rhythm of life to a certain extent.
If everyone can have two hours of free time during their lunch break, go downstairs for a while, breathe fresh air and then go to eat some serious food, then who has to wait for takeout?
If everyone is not forced to be tied to the workstation during working hours, but can move freely, then even if you want to drink a cup of milk tea, you can take two steps to buy a cup, do you have to let the rider send it over?
If everyone can leave work on time at six or seven o’clock in the evening without spending an hour or two commuting, then if you want to shop, you have enough time to go to the mall after get off work, do you have to use flash sales?
But the result is that everyone is indeed more and more dependent on takeaway and platforms.
And when all our rhythm of life is dependent on the efficient and stable services delivered by the platform, it also means that we have handed over the initiative in life.
When the platform wants to take away the capacity from the three meals a day, to rush the order volume, to bet on flash sales, we will suddenly find that we can’t eat breakfast on time.
In the same way, when the platform wants to shut down a business that is not profitable enough, withdraw from a market that is not profitable enough, or change a strategic goal, how many people’s life order will be changed.
Of course, it is definitely a good thing that the platform is willing to pay real money subsidies.
The merchant’s income is high, the takeaway brother has earned rewards, and consumers have bought cheap drinks, which is all value.
However, in addition to these, it is also a value to deliver services stably, maintain the smooth operation of the system, not create bubbles and involution in a single industry and field in the name of “strategy” and “competition”, and do not allow the system to exacerbate the contradiction between ordinary people and ordinary people, and not cause waste of resources.
