LONDONERS' WAY#4 Super-Supermarket

There are a lot of supermarket chains in the UK. Especially we can see the names, Tesco and Sainsbury's everywhere. These two are the top 1 & 2 of a  number of retail shops in the UK, so they are good rivals for each other. They have numerous products in their stores and substitute stocks every day. What I remark is their store roll-out plan. I realized about Hema's strategy I had known when I had visited Shanghai. Hema is the biggest supermarket in Shanghai managed by Alibaba.

Jack Ma put forward OMO(Online merge Offline) in 2016. And then Alibaba bought retail shops one after another to cover all market areas. If Alibaba completes this investment, retail shops work as delivery hubs of EC. The reason why they remind me of Hema is that they put shops in a similar way to Hema, which means that they opened different sizes of shops in each market area and to each purpose. So in my opinion, Tesco or Sainsbury's could become OMO companies if they would encourage a digital transformation more or M&A with a gigantic tech-company. 

I was surprised that most supermarkets use self-checkout registration systems. This system is really simple and assumes human-supports. When I want to buy alcohol and scan alcohol's code, the machine alerts to permit and then we ask the staff to check my ID, finally activate that. The process of human involvement lets the system is simple and saves the cost of invention.

In addition, it's based on the view "human nature is fundamentally good" because I can steal stuff easily if I want. At this point, Japanese companies can learn what they should do. Many retail companies in Japan try to make a complete self-checkout system but it is worthless and needs not because most Japanese are good persons the same as British. So I think the same system works in Japan too.

*This journal is based on the project in my school.