What is a left-shift in consumption?
It is said that in a "the abscissa is **, the ordinate is the quality" coordinates, when the economy is less than expected, everyone will naturally become "**sensitive", requiring the goods to be lower, but still requiring the original product quality. In this coordinate system, compared with before, the consumer demand will naturally shift to the left.
In short, everyone cares more and more about cost performance. Not only has this change on our side, but Amazon and Walmart, as the two most well-known retailers in the United States, have coincidentally changed their brand slogan to "spend less." smile more.And "s**e money, live better" - both save and good, this is the value proposition of consumption to the left. For another example, after McDonald's experienced the new crown epidemic, its market value has reached a 5-year high, and another company that also stands at the historical market value high is "Uniqlo", which sells clothes, and these two have always been weather vanes. In addition, Pinduoduo's contrarian trend has also attracted attention, many people interpret it as a social return to poverty or something, I don't think it is, whether it is Pinduoduo in the Chinese market, or Pinduoduo is used to open up the American market and shine Temu, it is more similar to a kind of middle-class "consumption conservatism", or "strengthening the sense of consumer value", that is, not spending a penny more for the premium, which belongs to everyone's spontaneous reaction to the future after lowering expectations. 1
If we compare China and Japan, in today's situation, if we rely too much on external purchasing power, it is easy to follow the old path of Japan, and domestic demand is still the foundation of economic sustainability, but the mentality of our society is a bit similar to that of Japan at the beginning.
Before Japan's real estate problems in those years, the entire national economy was basically not in trouble, and it has been high-spirited. In this context, the people's expectations for the future are very strong, and they feel that their wages are rising every year, and if they take out a loan of 10,000 yuan now, they will be nothing in a few years.
Dare to consume and dare to borrow, borrowed from the future for 30 years to spend the current time, the economy is thriving driven by real estate. There is a view that the long-term weakness of the Japanese economy after the 90s is essentially that the prosperity of the 80s was overdrawn, and the debts were repaid in the next 30 years, and the economy seems to be getting better again.
After Japan's real estate problems, the economy has entered a "recession" cycle, and the expectations of the vast majority of people have changed greatly. The biggest change is that I no longer feel that the salary will be higher and higher, and I don't feel that the job is particularly easy to find.
Further, a social trend of thought has emerged, and almost all ordinary people feel that they should restrain their desire to consume, increase their savings, and be ready to survive the winter at any time.
Japan, on the other hand, calls this mentality the "awakening of East Asian traditions." It is said that these countries in East Asia, mainly China, Japan and South Korea, have long had a history of large populations and few places and lack of resources, and everyone felt that they should be ready to survive the winter at any time, and this trend of thought began to spread after the Japanese economy was sluggish.
As a result, the Japanese side began a vigorous "renunciation" and engaged in "minimalism". The house does not want to buy a large one in debt, but concentrates on studying how to improve the efficiency of the current small house, and develops this kind of play into a science, that is, "storage science".
As you can see, this may have happened in our country to a greater or lesser extent.
Of course, China will not simply copy Japan's situation, after all, Japan is a country with very small domestic demand, and we still have a lot of room for excavation. Our country will not be stuck in stagnation like Japan, but there is basically a consensus on low growth.
If you think about it, even if the annual growth rate of 4%-5% is still outrageous, even if it drops to about 3% like the United States, it is still a lot of growth, and it will increase by one-third of South Korea every year.
It's just that at this growth rate, many of the concepts that everyone is accustomed to must change, or they have changed. At the very least, you don't think that wages will keep rising in the future, and you have to think about it when you increase leverage.
For example, as mentioned earlier, Liangliang Lijun and his wife in Zhengzhou dare to spend 70% of their income on repaying loans, and their situation is not an isolated case, but everywhere. Although I haven't heard them talk about why they can't think about it so much, I feel that the salary will continue to rise in the future, and now the pressure is high, and the salary will naturally dilute the pressure in a few years.
But in just three years, everyone can no longer understand why they were so confident in the previous years, even though everyone did it three years ago.
After readjusting the expectations for the future, everyone may have conservative expectations for the future, pay more attention to the use value of goods, and are less and less willing to pay for various premiums.
Not only that, but luxury consumption has significantly decreased this year, and many people say that the rich are not moving to spend.
By observing the situation around me, I feel that the current environment has little impact on the rich, and they should still spend their money.
The big impact is the group of people who stood on tiptoe to buy luxury goods before, they finally became rational this year, and they were going to buy bags in installments, but now they don't dare to borrow casually. There are also people who have saved up for a long time to buy luxury goods, and now suddenly realize that this money may be more useful if they are kept.
This has happened in Japan, where girls in the 80s were crazy about luxury brands, and after entering the 90s, there was a big turning point in thinking. Now everyone can clearly feel that the girls on the streets of Japan are carrying a cloth bag, and the proportion of brand-name bags is very low.
Is it going to spiral down forever in the future? Judging from the situation in developed countries, they have all gone through such a process, and the rapid transition has become as plain as water. When you are no longer aggressive in consumption, how much money you have, how much time you live.
We often say "K-shaped recovery", and the lower one always gives people the feeling that they have fallen into a pit, but in fact, the lower one is also a recovery. Consumers begin to pursue cost-effective consumption is also consumption, the market will show strong adaptability, and a bunch of enterprises will emerge, such as Mixue Bingcheng.
Generally speaking, many people may think that this is not a good thing, but it is not necessarily. Jack Ma once said that great companies are established in winter. Because the biggest advantage of a company established in winter is low cost and stable down.
This has happened in the West before. At the time of the oil crisis, the people of Europe and the United States were very painful because of the high oil prices, and the Japanese and Korean car companies swept the world, with low prices and durability as the selling points, and laid their own territory and maintained it until now.
It is generally believed that the people of Europe and the United States completed the conceptual change brought about by this "shift of consumption to the left" in the 70s of the last century, and their ordinary people have not paid much attention to high-premium products since then.
In other words, the economy is in transition, everyone's consumption habits are changing, and the kind of radical borrowing and consumption may become less and less in the future, and "* sensitive" has become the mainstream. In order to adapt to this shift, the supply side will also change.
Japan made a large-scale adjustment very early, and they launched a gameplay called "Experience the upper middle class, ** low class". How? There is no good way, through the integration of the first chain and process, optimize the process and business model, reduce the first while improving the competitiveness, and firmly occupy the market.
Among them, the most talked about is the Uniqlo, which started with a middle-class strategy and a relatively high price. Later, after Japan's large-scale consumption shifted to the left, Uniqlo also adjusted its strategy and adopted a high-quality but low-price strategy, which has been working well.
Moreover, car companies have begun to launch small cars like the Fit on a large scale, as well as models like K-Car, which are durable and have very low fuel consumption. At that time, the competition was fierce, and many car companies were a little slower to launch small cars, so they lost their last chance and soon went out of business.
Isn't it difficult to say this, don't you think it's just selling bargains?
Anyone who has been a boss may know that it is difficult to be low and make people feel a sense of quality.
Whether it is Mixue Bingcheng or Uniqlo, it is a technical threshold, and it can make the best to be lower than the same kind, and ensure basic quality control, and make money, which is the ability in itself, and behind this is the ability to integrate the first chain.
There is no way, consumers' consumption concepts are changing, and businesses will be finished if they can't keep up.
In the past two years, everyone can also feel these trends mentioned above, and another thing that everyone consumes a lot in daily life, takeaway, is also quietly changing.
An obvious trend is that more and more big catering brands are starting to engage in "brand satellite stores", only doing takeaways, not dine-in.
The rented store may not be prosperous, but the benefits are also obvious, the rental cost has been greatly reduced, the payback period of operating costs has been shortened a lot, and many people consume the same as many people by covering the surrounding area through takeout. On the basis of the same quality of ingredients, it can be made cheaper, and consumers benefit from it. Competitiveness has also gone up, and consumers have benefited.
Some time ago, there was a short ** that said that the rent of a fried shop in Hangzhou rose from 400,000 yuan to 1.2 million yuan, and the boss couldn't bear it. The topic of rent** is also uncomfortable for the public, because the cost of food and beverage rent** will eventually be passed on to consumers. Nowadays, many takeaway restaurants have begun to operate in reverse, looking for places with low rents to open and improve their competitiveness.
Seeing this, everyone may be worried about hygiene or something. Basically, no, because it's mainly big companies that do this now.
For example, **Lou, one of the representative brands of high-end Hunan cuisine in Changsha, has taken the lead in launching a takeaway sub-brand in the country in recent years - "Lou Wai Dishan". They found that the consumer group of takeaway is different from dine-in, and the consumption potential of takeaway customers is very large, especially in the past one or two years, consumers have begun to pursue high cost performance, and the market for takeaway has become larger and larger.
A dining store is only about 70 square meters, and the whole process is monitored, which is equivalent to a miniature restaurant, but because it is not in a prosperous area, the rent is much less. The significant reduction in the size of the store has effectively reduced the cost of various non-food ingredients, so the food is more cost-effective. **The per capita unit price of dine-in is generally 120-200 yuan, and the per capita unit price of dine-in is about 30-50 yuan, which is obvious enough.
Another well-known Hunan cuisine brand, Nongji, is also engaged in brand satellite stores. At present, there are two main types of stores in Nongji: one is a large dine-in store of hundreds or even thousands of square meters, which is mainly opened in shopping malls, with an average of 80 yuan per person; The other is a takeaway specialty store of more than ten or twenty square meters, mainly opened in the community, under the office building, etc., with an average of 30 yuan per person.
This brand satellite store model of separate dine-in and take-out has become the main exploration direction of "quality-price ratio" for brand restaurant companies in recent years.
Of course, not only takeaways, but most bosses have to rethink how to survive.
Before, it was more like a "gimmick economy", you made a big news and sold some ** goods, and everyone recognized it. From now on, it will be the "UNIQLO economy", and you will have to show enough sincerity and ability to provide affordable quality.
Epilogue
As soon as a lot of people are born, the whole society seems to have been running wild, and then within a few years there has been a sharp turn.
From the experience of developed countries, it seems that every country has a stage when economic growth slows down, and people begin to accept that their purchasing power may not change much in the future. What they are doing is similar to what we do now, try to reduce unnecessary consumption, focus on what they want to do, and then spend their lives adapting to this state.
In 2019, I went to the vicinity of Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and I found that the legendary fashion capital of Paris, the people carrying brand-name bags are not as good as Beijing SKP and Guomao, mainly because they are all from here. Now we are living through what they have been through.
Maybe even if the economy gets better in the future, many people may never be able to go back.
However, this trend is not a bad thing for ordinary people, and rational consumption can make everyone go further. And this trend itself is also a business opportunity, just like the Uniqlo I mentioned above, Michelle Bingcheng and domestic catering "brand satellite stores", it is also a market with unlimited potential.