Rebirth of the Wild Age

Speaking of supermarket chains, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and the like may come to mind at first.

But around 2000, although these foreign supermarkets had entered China, their influence was far inferior to that of local supermarket chain brands in China.

At this time, the top three supermarket chains in China are: Shenghai Lianhua, Shenghai Hualian, and Jingcheng Hualian. The brand names are very similar, and those who don’t know it think they are triplet brothers.

Hua Zhou is 56 years old this year. The Hualian Supermarket he founded has always been at the top of China's retail chain industry. It's a pity that it encountered the Asian financial turmoil, coupled with the introduction of advanced Western models by its opponents, it was overtaken by Lianhua Supermarket in one fell swoop, and now Hualian Supermarket has become the No. 2 in Wannian.

Chairman, Boss Song is here! The secretary knocked on the door.

Please come in. After Hua Zhou finished speaking, he immediately stood up and walked to the center of the office to shake hands with Song Weiyang.

Song Weiyang was accompanied by two staff members, each carrying a large cardboard box.

Hua Zhou was stunned when he saw this. He received a call a few days ago saying that Song Weiyang wanted to visit him in person. He immediately put down everything this morning and sat in the office waiting patiently. This is not because Xifeng is one of the major suppliers of Hualian Supermarket, but because Song Weiyang has too much influence and is warmly received wherever he goes.

Boss Song, are you giving me a present? Hua Zhou pointed at the box and smiled.

Song Weiyang smiled and said, I really came here today to give Chairman Hua a gift.

Please sit down, Hua Zhou asked his secretary to make tea, and sat on the sofa himself, jokingly said, I am the leader of a state-owned enterprise, so I cannot accept gifts. Boss Song, please don't corrupt me.

Although Hualian Supermarket was founded by Huazhou, it is a state-owned enterprise, and he does not even have shares in the company. And the supermarket is a strong player. Many brands want to enter the market, they have to give gifts or kickbacks to their leaders. This has become an unspoken rule in the industry. But Huazhou is well-known in the industry as a clean and honest figure. He is close to retirement age, does not have any equity in the company, and rarely accepts gifts.

Song Weiyang said: Director Hua, today's gift, you have to accept it if you don't.

Hua Zhou smiled and said, I've only seen people who buy and sell by force, but never give gifts by force. I want to see what kind of gift Boss Song brought.

Song Weiyang said to the two followers: Go to work.

Two workers unpacked the box immediately, and quickly took out the computer for assembly. This computer is very strange, with many extra parts and even a small iron drawer.

What is this? Hua Zhou asked curiously.

Electronic cash register, Song Weiyang waited for the computer to be assembled, picked up the scanning gun and said, This thing scans the barcode of the product, and the product information is directly entered into the computer. The computer comes with a full Chinese cash register software written by Jinshan Company. Automatically calculate the payable amount and the change amount. The cashier presses this button again, and the drawer pops up. The drawer is divided into several compartments, which can be used to store banknotes of different amounts, which is very convenient to use.”

Huazhou immediately thought of a scene: the cashier quickly scanned the goods, the computer software automatically settled the payment, and then the drawer popped out to quickly give change.

Good stuff! Hua Zhou said happily.

Song Weiyang smiled and asked, Is this gift not bad?

Not bad, not bad, Hua Zhou nodded repeatedly, and asked, How much is one?

Song Weiyang said: If you purchase in large quantities, you only need 6,000 units, and it comes with a full Chinese cash register software. The main reason is that this scanner is very expensive, and there is no stock in the country, so we can only rely on imports.

Huazhou immediately made a decision and said: I need to try it first, if it works, I will order 600 units at once!

Director Hua is refreshing, Song Weiyang said cheerfully, I thought it would take a lot of drooling, so I personally came to persuade him. I didn't expect Director Hua to be so business-minded.

Hua Zhou said: If Boss Song doesn't come, I guess he will go to America next year to make purchases.

With the increasingly fierce competition in the supermarket industry, major brands are trying to introduce advanced Western models.

The various management expenses of Hualian Supermarket now account for more than 4% of total sales, while Wal-Mart can control it below 2% in the United States. The gap of 2 percentage points is fatal to the retail industry, so this year we started to build an intelligent procurement center: supermarkets use the ECR system, and according to their own needs, they can place orders in the supermarket with one click, and each supplier immediately You can get detailed information.

And this kind of computer cash register is part of the supermarket POS system, and only a few supermarkets in China have installed it. Even if it is installed, there are almost no scanning guns, because there are a large number of commodity packages without barcodes, and there is nowhere to scan if you want to scan.

Even big brands such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour are still very backward in China. So far, the ECR system has not been fully established. Many Wal-Mart and Carrefour still have manual cash registers.

Still the same sentence, thank the country, thank the government.

In order to expand the export volume of commodities, China began to establish the China Article Numbering Center in 1988, and vigorously promoted commodity barcodes in the early 1990s. In the first few years, only exported goods had barcodes, because without barcodes, there would be great restrictions.

With the continuous advancement of the WTO negotiations, China revised the bar code standards for commodities in 1998, and finally standardized the various domestic bar codes. At that time, there were already nearly 50,000 domestic companies and 500,000 kinds of products with barcodes, but except for export commodities, the barcodes of other products were perfunctory, printed on the packaging casually, and could not be scanned with a scanning gun. The reason why Wal-Mart and Carrefour do not have scanning guns in Chinese supermarkets is purely for decoration.

Until July of this year, when China's accession to wto is imminent, the National Bureau of Quality Supervision issued the Implementation Measures for the Qualification Certification of Commodity Barcode Printing, which further standardized the printing and qualification certification of commodity barcodes. The goal is to achieve a pass rate of more than 80% for barcodes in China within three years.

Huazhou asked his employees to bring dozens of products from the warehouse, and he personally experimented with a scanning gun. As a result, he scanned a box of biscuits, a bag of instant noodles, and two bottles of drinks one after another, but there was no response. Huazhou asked in confusion, The machine is broken?

Song Weiyang smiled and brought a bottle of Xifeng iced tea to him. With a beep, the computer immediately displayed the product information: The machine is not broken, it is a problem with the product bar code. Some bar codes are not printed up to standard, and some are simply invalid bar codes. .Products produced after August this year should have a higher barcode qualification rate, because the government has strengthened supervision.”

Hua Zhou frowned and said, It's useless if you can't sweep it out.

Song Weiyang said: You can directly enter the barcode number, and after the cashier is proficient, it can be done in a few seconds.

Hua Zhou tried to operate it by himself. As expected, there are three products that could not be scanned for information just now, and can be displayed by entering the serial number. There was only one box of biscuits left, and no matter how you entered the number, it was invalid. Obviously, it was fooled by the merchant himself.

Song Weiyang said: For products with invalid barcodes, you can only use the in-store codes in the supermarket, or simply pay manually.

Huazhou had his own plan in mind. For the products with invalid barcodes that had already been purchased, he would use the manual settlement method first, and at the same time ordered the merchants to improve. If the next batch of goods can’t be scanned, then I’m sorry, our supermarket won’t accept this kind of product. “State-owned enterprise + supermarket” belongs to the uncle among the uncles, and the merchants can only be obedient.

Huazhou tried the cash register software again, and what made him most satisfied was the settlement of vegetables and fruits. The software can pre-set the unit price, and the cashier only needs to input the weight instead of manually calculating the total price.

Song Weiyang said: If Director Hua is willing to spend money, he can buy a printer and connect it to it, and issue invoices directly at the time of settlement. He can also print the store code when selling vegetables and fruits.

It's a good idea! Hua Zhou was very satisfied.

The Shenzhou chip uses the arm framework, which cannot support Microsoft systems, so naturally it cannot be used as a personal computer. Then change the way of thinking, Song Weiyang selected a foreign linux system in advance, on this basis, he asked Jinshan to develop the cash register software, and then designed the details of the cash register platform, just waiting for the successful development of the Shenzhou chip.

This is a blank market, there are more and more supermarkets across the country, and there is no competing product yet.

Song Weiyang personally negotiated the second Hualian Supermarket in the industry, and the sales staff in Shenzhou immediately took Hualian's order form and ran to the industry's leader, Lianhua Supermarket, to discuss business. After Shenghai's Hualian and Lianhua were settled, they went to Shenghai 100, but the leader of this broken company actually said that they would hold a meeting to discuss it.

Shenghai 100 has not held a meeting to discuss the results. Jingcheng Hualian and Jicheng Hualian have agreed to purchase, and there are other 6 supermarket chain brands that have placed orders.

In fact, Shenzhou's cash register computers began to be mass-produced at this time, and the one Song Weiyang brought was manually assembled.

The computer has not yet been offline, and has received a total of more than 5,000 orders. And the profit is extremely high, the pre-tax profit of each computer can reach 2,500 yuan, throwing Lenovo's low-end computer profits a few streets away. Because this thing has very low performance requirements except for the heat dissipation of the motherboard (continuous work), in principle, it only needs to run a cashier software.

Next, Shenzhou Technology will also contact the printer company to launch a cash register computer with printing function.

As long as the goods are spread all over the country's large supermarkets, the scattered small supermarkets will follow suit. Moreover, the number of such small supermarkets will increase, and even develop to several in one street. These are all potential customers of China Computer.