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零售启示录的下一阶段:重生为电子商务仓库的商店 | 出海美国电商岛群第64期

2020-07-22 17:53:35

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随着面对面购物需求的减少,房东、初创公司和零售商正在将废弃的商店转变为在线配送中心

当莉蒂莎·托马斯(Litisha Thomas)从流言中得知,她工作了11年、已经关闭的山姆俱乐部(Sam 's Club)可能会在她所在的北卡罗来纳州乡村村庄重新开业时,她立即切换到一个互联网招聘网站上,看看那里是否在招人。是的,但这不是常规的重新开放。

 

以沃尔玛(Walmart Inc.)创始人山姆会员店(Sam 's Club)命名的折扣购物俱乐部正在改变其经营方式。这家零售巨头的子公司将2019年4月重新开放的整幢大楼改造成了一个电子商务履行中心,东南部各地samsclub.com购物者的订单在这里被挑选、包装,然后装上卡车送往其他运输中心。

 

托马斯之前在北卡罗来纳州伦伯顿市的山姆会员俱乐部(Sam 's Club)做通宵接待助理,开着叉车过夜,现在她又回到了叉车后面,不过现在她是一名管理其他八名员工的经理。

 

从外面看,她工作的大楼和原来没什么区别,而内部却没有挤满推着推车的购物者的宽大过道,从地板到天花板的货架上塞满了员工挑选和运送到传送带的货物,比以往更加密集。

 

尽管缺少购物者和收银机,但总的就业率实际上却在上升:托马斯女士说,该商店以前雇用了164名工人,其中大约四分之一是兼职。现在,在三班制中有近300名全职员工。

 

欢迎来到“零售启示录”的下一阶段。Sam's Club还在全国其他五家大型商店完成了这一转换,这是一种新兴趋势的一部分,在该趋势中,各种规模的零售空间都被转换为电子商务履行中心。 CBRE Group Inc.工业和物流研究副总监Matthew Walaszek说,疫情可能加速了从实体零售向在线购物的转变,但是多年来零售向工业空间的转化率一直在加速增长。按收入计算的全球最大商业房地产服务公司。

 

一项刚刚完成的CBRE分析发现,自2017年以来,在过去10年总共完成或正在进行的94个此类项目中,有60个新的零售转工业项目至少进入了预先规划阶段。自2017年开始或完成的项目将原先的1400万平方英尺的零售空间改造成了1520万平方英尺的工业空间,其中大部分用于电子商务分销。与美国145亿平方英尺的工业地产相比,这仍是一个相对较小的比例。

 

Walaszek先生说:“我们还不能说(这些转变)已经取得了很大的进展,但这是一种已经形成的趋势,在可预见的未来,我们将看到它的扩张。”

 

仓储初创企业Ohi当然指望着它。该公司在美国80个城市为电子商务的微型仓库运营或提供操作软件,其面积从几百平方英尺到几千平方英尺不等。其中一个地点是曼哈顿服装区西38街(West 38 Street)的前办公空间。它的位置之一是位于曼哈顿服装区西38街的前办公空间。这是不寻常的-电子商务履行中心通常位于郊区,占地多达100万平方英尺。知名品牌和小型直接面向消费者的品牌都使用Ohi的仓库,以吸引相对富裕的城市消费者。Ohi创始人兼首席执行长琼斯(Ben Jones)说,这些初创公司利用Ohi的配送中心就近存放商品,实现当日送达。

 

使用Ohi仓库的品牌包括Olipop,该公司宣传其“益生元起泡补品”事作为苏打水的健康替代品。

 

“我们从蒙大拿州向全国各地发货,但受制于联邦快递(FedEx)和联合包裹(UPS),”Olipop的增长营销经理Steven Vigilante表示。他补充说,将纽约客户的配送转移到Ohi的曼哈顿配送中心,平均运费降低了一半,配送时间从1至2周缩短至2小时。

 

介于这两个极端之间的是迎合中等收入美国人需求的中型零售商,其中许多正在寻求在现有的商店中增加电子商务功能。包括艾伯森(Albertsons Cos.)在内的一些全球大型食品杂货连锁店。沃尔玛(walmart)、Wakefern Food Corp.和法国家乐福(Carrefour SA)就属于这一类。为他们提供自动化系统的起飞技术公司(起飞Technologies)联合创始人兼总裁佩德罗(Max Pedro)说,他们正在或计划在现有商店或邻近的零售空间内使用或使用几乎完全自动化的微实现仓库。

 

腾飞10000平方英尺的微型配送中心占据了典型杂货店的一部分,代表了它的大部分销售额,或约15,000种不同的商品类型。它们广泛使用机器人技术和自动化技术从货架上取货,因此在每笔订单完成前,几乎不需要人工操作。

 

佩德罗指出,这些自动化系统的目的是要比员工在过道里或库房里走动时更有效地组装和打包订单,而且让配送中心紧挨着商店还有其他好处。两者都可以用同一辆卡车进行补给,员工可以随着需求的变化在两者之间移动,而且他们离顾客很近,可以为零售商节省一些配送成本。

 

许多大型零售商,包括沃尔玛(Walmart)、塔吉特(Target Corp.),以及亚马逊(Amazon)即将开设的杂货店。该公司正在采取一种相关但又截然不同的方式:从商店直接发货。已经开始提供路边取货的商店,在某种程度上也成为了这一趋势的一部分。

 

每个决定零售空间的企业都有自己的理由来处理电子商务订单,但有两种相互交叉的趋势发挥了重要作用。甚至在大流行之前,由于客流量下降,零售商店和购物中心就已经关闭,电子商务就像吃豆人(Pac-Man)吞噬鬼魂一样,继续吞噬着实体零售市场的份额。自今年3月以来,美国开始出现家庭订单在美国,这一趋势只是在加速。

 

与此同时,由于需求激增,电子商务和其他工业空间的租金也在攀升。CBRE的瓦拉瑟克说,零售租金上涨和仓储租金下降之间的差距正在缩小。

 

办公空间也可以转换成微型配送中心,Ohi在曾经的办公空间中至少建立了一个小型配送仓库。随着公司重新考虑是否希望其雇员重返办公室,也可以提供更多此类房地产。

 

随着美国人从实体店购物转向网上购物,所有这些商品都必须从某个地方运过来。我们要求它们到达我们的速度越快,它们就必须离我们越近,这就需要比以往任何时候都多的电子商务仓库,而且是在以前很少出现的地方,比如城市中心。

 

一位研究了这些趋势的经济学家得出了令人惊讶的结论:如果将所有工作都包括在履行,交付和相关角色中,则电子商务在2007年至2020年1月之间创造的就业机会要多于实体零售商所失去的就业机会。智囊机构渐进政策研究所首席经济策略师迈克尔·曼德尔(Michael Mandel)。自一月份以来,该部门的就业人数下降了,但曼德尔博士认为,随着消费者支出的恢复,该领域的就业人数也将恢复。

 

虽然很容易把这些趋势看成是宽泛的抽象概念,但这也是托马斯女士有工作和加薪的原因——她住在南方一个小镇,是两个孩子的母亲。

 

她每天都会去她工作了十多年的那栋大楼,那栋大楼于2018年1月关闭。有一些不同之处。她说,招牌上写的是Samsclub.com,而不是Sam 's Club,停车场上满是牵引式挂车。在她的内心世界里,情况发生了更大的变化,有更多的商品,新的传送带,一个运输区域。“有时我会发现自己在地板上走着,想象着它曾经是什么样子,”她补充道。

 

山姆会员俱乐部的顾客仍然在公司购物——只是,像我们许多人一样,他们现在在家购物。如果这种趋势持续下去,那么就就业、房地产、消费模式、供应链和土地使用而言,就像北卡罗来纳州的伦伯顿(Lumberton)一样,整个国家都会如此。

 

The Next Phase of the Retail Apocalypse: Stores Reborn as E-Commerce Warehouses

As the demand for in-person shopping diminishes, landlords, startups and retailers are converting abandoned stores into online fulfillment centers

 

When Litisha Thomas heard through the gossip mill that the shuttered Sam’s Club where she’d worked for 11 years might be reopening in her rural North Carolina hamlet, she immediately jumped on an internet job board to see if it was hiring. It was, but this wasn’t a conventional reopening.

 

Sam’s Club, the discount shopping club named for the founder of Walmart Inc., WMT -0.20% was changing how it does business. The retail giant’s subsidiary converted the entire building, which reopened in April 2019, into an e-commerce fulfillment center, where orders from samsclub.com shoppers throughout the southeast are picked, packed and placed on trucks that take them to other shipping hubs.

 

Ms. Thomas—who’d previously driven a forklift as an overnight receiving associate at the Sam’s Club in Lumberton, N.C., population 20,000—is back behind the wheel of a forklift, though now she’s a manager overseeing eight other employees.

 

The building in which she works looks about the same on the outside, but inside, instead of wide aisles filled with shoppers pushing carts, its floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed more densely than ever with goods being picked by employees and shuttled to conveyor belts.

 

Despite the lack of shoppers and cash registers, total employment is actually up: Previously the store employed 164 workers, about a quarter of them part time, says Ms. Thomas. Now there are nearly 300 full-time employees across three shifts.

 

Welcome to the next phase of the “retail apocalypse.” This conversion—which Sam’s Club has also completed for five other big-box stores throughout the country—is part of a burgeoning trend in which retail spaces of all sizes are being converted into e-commerce fulfillment centers. The global pandemic may have turbocharged the shift from bricks-and-mortar retail to online shopping, but the rate of conversion of retail into industrial spaces has been accelerating for years, says Matthew Walaszek, associate director of industrial and logistics research at CBRE Group Inc., the world’s largest commercial real-estate services firm by revenue.

 

A just-completed CBRE analysis found that since 2017, 60 new retail-to-industrial conversion projects have entered at least the preplanning stage, out of a total of 94 such projects completed or in progress in the past decade. Projects begun or completed since 2017 transformed 14 million square feet of former retail space into 15.2 million square feet of industrial space, most of it for e-commerce distribution. That’s still a relatively small proportion of the 14.5 billion square feet of industrial real estate in the U.S.

 

“We wouldn’t say [these conversions] are moving the needle quite yet, but it’s a trend that has legs and we’re going to see this expand into the foreseeable future,” says Mr. Walaszek.

 

Warehousing startup Ohi is certainly counting on it. The company operates, or provides operational software for, micro-warehouses for e-commerce fulfillment ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand square feet in 80 cities across the U.S.

 

One of its locations is in former office space on West 38th Street in Manhattan’s Garment District. That’s unusual—e-commerce fulfillment hubs are typically in suburbia, occupying up to a million square feet. Ohi’s warehouses are used by both well-established brands and small direct-to-consumer ones aiming to reach relatively well-off consumers in cities. These startups use Ohi’s fulfillment centers to store their goods close to consumers, allowing for same-day delivery, says the company’s founder and chief executive, Ben Jones.

 

Brands using Ohi’s warehouses include Olipop, which advertises its “prebiotic sparkling tonics” as healthy alternatives to soda.

 

“We ship nationally from Montana, but at the mercy of FedEx and UPS, ” says Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s growth marketing manager. Moving New York City customer delivery to Ohi’s Manhattan fulfillment center cut average shipping costs in half and delivery times from 1 to 2 weeks to as little as two hours, he adds.

 

Between these two extremes are medium-size retailers catering to middle-income Americans, many of which are looking to add e-commerce fulfillment to their existing stores. A number of big grocery chains across the globe, including Albertsons Cos., Wakefern Food Corp. and France’s Carrefour SA, fall into this category. They are using or planning to use almost fully automated micro-fulfillment warehouses either within existing stores or in adjacent retail spaces, says Max Pedró, co-founder and president of Takeoff Technologies, which provides them with automated systems.

 

Takeoff’s 10,000-square-foot micro-fulfillment centers hold the portion of a typical grocery store that represents most of its sales, or around 15,000 different item types. They make extensive use of robotics and automation to retrieve groceries from shelves, and so require little in the way of human labor to operate until the final stages of each order.

 

These automated systems are meant to assemble and pack orders more efficiently than employees roaming aisles or visiting stockrooms, and keeping the fulfillment center next to the store has additional benefits, notes Mr. Pedró. Both can be resupplied from the same trucks, staff can move between the two as demand shifts between them, and their proximity to customers can save retailers some delivery costs.

 

Many big retailers, including Walmart, Target Corp. and, in its forthcoming grocery stores, Amazon. com Inc., are taking a related but distinct approach: shipping directly from stores. Even stores that have begun offering curbside pickup amid the pandemic are, in a way, becoming part of the trend.

 

Each business that decides retail space might be better used for filling e-commerce orders does so for its own reasons, but two intersecting trends play a big role. Retail stores and shopping centers were closing on account of declining foot traffic even before the pandemic, as e-commerce continued gobbling bricks-and-mortar retail market share like Pac-Man chomping ghosts. Since March and the beginning of stay-at-home orders in the U.S., the trend has only accelerated.

 

Meanwhile, rents for e-commerce fulfillment and other industrial spaces are climbing due to that surging demand. The gap between higher retail rent and lower warehousing rent is closing, says CBRE’s Mr. Walaszek.

 

Office space can also be converted into micro-fulfillment centers, and Ohi has set up at least one of its small fulfillment warehouses in what was once office space. As companies reconsider whether they ever want their employees to return to offices, more of this kind of real estate could also be available.

 

As Americans shift from buying things in-store to buying them online, all of those goods have to be shipped from somewhere. The faster we demand they get to us, the closer they have to be stored, which necessitates more e-commerce warehouses than ever, and in places they’ve rarely been seen before, such as city centers.

 

One economist who has looked at these trends has concluded something surprising: When you include all the jobs in fulfillment, delivery, and related roles, e-commerce has created more jobs between 2007 and January 2020 than bricks-and-mortar retailers lost, says Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. Since January, employment in this sector has fallen, but Dr. Mandel believes that as consumer spending recovers, so will employment in this area.

 

While it’s easy to see these trends as broad abstractions, they’re also why Ms. Thomas—a mother of two living in a small southern town—has a job, and a pay raise.

 

Every day, she goes to the same building she worked in for over a decade before it closed in January 2018. There are some differences. The sign says Samsclub.com instead of Sam’s Club, she says, and the parking lot is full of tractor-trailer trucks. Inside, things have changed more. There’s more merchandise, new conveyor belts, a shipping area. “Sometimes I’ll catch myself walking the floor and picturing what it used to be,” she adds.

 

Sam’s Club customers are still shopping with the company—it’s just that, like so many of us, they’re now doing it from home. If trends continue, then in terms of jobs, real estate, consumption patterns, supply chains and land use, as Lumberton, N.C. goes, so goes the nation.


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