Franchise Operators Struggle as Meituan and Alibaba Densify Instant Neighborhood Depots

本条来自 钛媒体（Business / 科技商业），聚焦 brand。 NextFin News —— Mei Lin’s phone begins its soft chime just after five on a recent morning in East Harbor. The basement space she rented a few months earlier already smells of cardboard and refrigerated air. She moves between the tall shelves by the light of a single hanging bulb, scanning barcodes on drinks, snacks, and household packs among more than five thousand items. Three to five minutes is the window she has allowed herself for each order before a courier arrives. She has not hired help. On some days her brother comes down the stairs to pack beside her; most days she works alone. The investment she placed into the lease, the fittings, and the first stock still sits heavy in her calculations. Daily orders hover around a hundred. Profit barely covers the basics. To keep the flow of traffic she has begun selling certain drinks for a single cent, knowing each one deepens the loss. That basement, and hundreds like it, now form the visible edge of a quiet contest playing out across the city’s residential blocks and commercial strips. Instant neighborhood depots—small warehouses stocked in advance so that ordinary goods can reach a customer within minutes—have multiplied with striking speed. Meituan and Alibaba, platforms that once specialized in restaurant meals or long-distance packages, now treat dense, controllable near-field supply as essential infrastructure. The operators who fill the shelves, however, live a different arithmetic. The People Who Keep the Shelves Moving In the early hours and late evenings the work is relentless. Junhao, a young franchisee who opened his depot last summer after seeing polished case studies of quick returns, describes a routine that has compressed the original staffing plan of six or seven people down to three. Pickers walk twenty to thirty thousand steps in a twelve-hour rotation with no fixed end. Inventory must be watched, platform rules tracked, after-sales messages answered. The promised full-service support from the brand side largely dissolved once the doors opened. Promotion fees drain outward while commissions of fifteen to twenty percent leave little margin. A single order can arrive whose gross profit fails to cover the courier fee. Mei and Junhao are not isolated cases. Conversations in operator groups and leasing offices return to the same pattern: initial outlays of several hundred thousand, optimistic projections of monthly income, then the discovery that visible costs—rent, utilities, stock—are only the surface. Invisible ones accumulate. Low-priced loss-leader items proliferate because traffic must be bought. When neighboring depots open within the same few kilometers, the same limited set of popular goods appears on every shelf. Price becomes the only remaining lever. Mr. Shen, who has managed community warehouse leasing for several years, watches the cycle from the landlord’s side. Occupancy rates once climbed above ninety percent. Now the calls he dreads are the ones that begin with a request to terminate early. Some tenants last less than three months. Others simply vanish, leaving unpaid rent and unsold stock that takes days to clear. He has begun shortening lease terms and raising deposits. When he shows a new prospect around a vacant unit he often asks, almost as a warning, whether the visitor understands how quickly these operations can close. Two Paths Toward the Same Grid Meituan and Alibaba continue to expand the network. From their vantage the problem is not excess density but insufficient reliable supply. A large number of depots does not automatically produce accurate inventory, consistent assortment, or the ability to shape what reaches a customer in a given neighborhood at a given hour. Meituan, whose roots lie in rapid delivery, has layered self-operated fresh-goods operations such as Xiaoxiang Supermarket, branded convenience formats, and specialized vertical stores onto a broad outer ring of independently run instant depots. The self-operated pieces serve as living laboratories—testing which items move at which times, how deep inventory should sit, how to reduce waste—so that knowledge can later be offered back to the wider network. Plans call for the outer ring of flash depots alone to exceed one hundred thousand locations in the coming years. Alibaba works in the opposite direction. It seeks to bring distant national inventories closer by authorizing partner-operated stores under shared brands such as Taobao Convenience Store, supplying systems, selection guidance, and traffic while leaving the physical assets and daily management with the local operator. Self-operated anchors including Hema and Tmall Supermarket provide reference standards and fill gaps, with additional independent front warehouses improving coverage density. The aim is the same: a lattice of stocked nodes close enough to customers that minutes, not days, become the normal measure of delivery.

Individual investors pour savings into tight-knit networks of rapid-delivery stores that major platforms need for urban dominance, only to confront oversaturation, thin margins, and the steady pressure of daily survival

• NextFin News —— Mei Lin’s phone begins its soft chime just after five on a recent morning in East Harbor