What is the essential difference between an unmanned convenience store and a vending machine?

2023-10-28

In many industry perspectives, the main characteristic of unmanned convenience stores and vending machines is "unmanned", which means reducing labor costs through unmanned retail while still meeting the demand for 24-hour store opening. In fact, the rapid spread of the concept of "unmanned retail" is closely related to the difficulties that physical stores have encountered in retail in recent years. With the rise of e-commerce, the penetration of the physical retail market is gradually deepening, and news such as physical stores closing and layoffs is not uncommon. In addition, the rental, water, electricity, and labor costs of offline stores continue to rise, making it more difficult for physical retail to compete with e-commerce in terms of price. Therefore, if physical retail wants to reduce operating costs, "unmanned" is clearly a good choice.

Coincidentally, the emergence of "unmanned convenience stores" can actually be said to be a product of the advancement of high-tech technologies such as online payment, the Internet of Things, and image recognition at a single node. Previously, the Internet emphasized "meeting the 80% needs of 80% of users". In the future, the addition of artificial intelligence will further improve the transaction efficiency of the entire system, and convenience stores can fully meet the 99% daily needs of one user.

In fact, all forms of unmanned retail in the current market can be divided into two types. One type is high-tech stores that require cutting-edge technologies such as computer vision, sensor fusion, deep learning, and biometrics. Self payment unmanned convenience stores like "Bingo Box" have lower technological content, no sensors or cameras, and can solve problems only to save costs and make the payment process faster. And more high-tech stores such as "Amazon Go" and "Taocoffee" can digitize all the customer behavior information captured by sensors and cameras, from entering to leaving, and obtain valuable information through big data algorithm models in the background, for more intuitive analysis of product arrangement and sales.

The core purpose of 'unmanned' is not just to simply subvert the traditional retail market, but to break the current bottleneck of e-commerce - visible and intangible. This issue is still a barrier that constrains the relationship between e-commerce and consumers. Although e-commerce has basically achieved direct connection with users and removed the layer by layer agency channels of traditional physical retail business models, achieving price advantages, relying solely on online technology improvement and enriching users' choices through evaluation mechanisms clearly cannot meet users' needs. In order to obtain a more authentic experience, Many users still choose to consume in physical stores.

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