又见“大逃杀”！60+知名品牌疯狂关店

This article outlines the 2024 H1 wave of store closures across China’s physical retail and food service sectors, presenting core data and an overview of current industry conditions. It helps general readers quickly grasp industry trends and offers practical guidance for individuals planning to open their own physical stores.

1. Key findings: Between January and June 2024, more than 60 well-known domestic brands have closed stores, with food service accounting for over half of all closures. Multiple once-leading industry players and viral internet brands have undergone large-scale contraction, or even shut down all locations. Mass closures have also hit luxury goods, traditional hypermarkets, home furniture, and anime-focused culture and sports retail.

2. Practical takeaways: Opening a physical business cannot rely on passion, a single hit product, or influencer-driven premium pricing alone. Operators must validate a profitable single-store model before expanding. To withstand market volatility, businesses also need to continuously update products, in-store experiences and marketing to align with younger consumers, control rent and supply chain costs, build clear differentiated competitive advantages, and develop efficient operational capabilities.

This article details the 2024 H1 wave of store closures across multiple domestic physical retail sectors and summarizes the core reasons brands exit the market, offering valuable reference for brands adjusting their strategies to align with shifting consumer trends.

1. Current consumer trends: China’s consumer market is characterized by "strong growth in services consumption, weak growth in goods consumption." Rational consumption has become the mainstream, many niche sectors have entered a stage of stock competition, and product category renewal is accelerating noticeably.

2. Common pitfalls for failed brands: Long-established incumbents have failed to systematically update their products, customer experiences and marketing strategies for younger generations, leading to a disconnect in brand perception. Many viral internet brands were force-matured by capital, expanding rapidly before validating a profitable single-store model, and were unable to sustain operations once the influencer premium bubble burst. Poor cost control and misaligned strategic positioning also contribute to brand exit.

3. Strategic insights: On the channel side, brands can follow the example of luxury players: focus on core commercial districts, cut non-core locations, and re-evaluate return on investment. On the product side, brands must balance solid operational efficiency and clear differentiated advantages, and avoid competing solely on a single hit product or brand nostalgia.

This article maps out 2024 H1 store closures in China’s physical retail and food service sectors, analyzes current industry conditions, risks and opportunities, and offers clear guidance for physical sellers adjusting their operating strategies.

1. Current industry landscape: The physical sector continues the trend of low growth and high turnover seen in 2023. Multiple sectors including food service, luxury goods, traditional hypermarkets, home furniture, and culture/sports/entertainment have seen mass closures. Overall stock competition is intensifying, and the industry淘汰 rate has risen noticeably.

2. Risk warnings: Long-established food service operators face high risk of brand perception disconnect; competition in casual dining segments such as tea, coffee and baked goods is cutthroat, and a misstep in any link can lead to exit. Traditional hypermarkets face disruption from new business models; the home furniture sector sees shrinking demand amid the housing market downturn; the anime-focused retail segment is already saturated and heavily homogenized. New entrants should proceed with caution.

3. Opportunities and actionable lessons: Warehouse clubs and hard-discount community supermarkets are still growing. Physical locations can achieve strong growth by focusing on core commercial districts, upgrading service experiences, and tapping into night-time consumption scenarios — for example, Yonghui’s newly renovated stores saw more than 250% growth in both foot traffic and sales. Sellers should validate a profitable single-store model before expanding, continuously update products, control costs, and build differentiated competitiveness.

This article outlines shifting consumer trends in China’s current market, offering reference for manufacturing and processing factories adjusting their product strategy, identifying business opportunities, and advancing transformation.

1. Shifts in product design and manufacturing demand: Consumers now demand higher experiential value from products, and brands that fail to meet user experience requirements are淘汰 quickly. The market favors high-value, transparently priced products, and clearly differentiated products have a stronger competitive edge. Consumer novelty for single hit products fades faster than ever.

2. Business opportunities: Warehouse clubs and hard-discount community supermarkets are performing well, and have stable incremental demand for high-value daily necessities and home goods. Factories can partner with these new channels and adjust their product mix to match demand.

3. Transformation insights: As product category turnover accelerates in the consumer market, factories need to advance digital transformation to improve response speed to shifting market demand. When partnering with brands, factories should assess the brands’ operational health to avoid idle capacity losses caused by brands’ overexpansion and subsequent contraction, and can diversify across multiple channel partners to spread risk.

This article analyzes the ongoing industry consolidation in China’s physical retail and food service sectors, summarizes core industry pain points and development trends, and helps service providers serving the physical sector identify customer needs and expand their business.

1. Industry development trends: The physical sector has now entered a stage of consolidation in a stock market. Brands across multiple sectors including food service, traditional hypermarkets, luxury goods and home furniture are contracting and adjusting. Sector divergence is clear: traditional formats are gradually exiting the market, while new formats continue growing. Overall industry demand for transformation and upgrading services has increased noticeably.

2. Core customer pain points: Physical brands broadly face upward pressure on rent and supply chain costs. Legacy brands struggle with aging brand identity, and failure to update products, marketing and experiences in a timely manner. New brands typically have unvalidated single-store profit models and unclear differentiated positioning. Traditional hypermarket and home furniture brands both need scenario upgrades and channel adjustments.

3. Business opportunities: Service providers can develop targeted solutions addressing these industry pain points, including brand upgrading, in-store scenario renovation, channel planning, and supply chain cost reduction. These services help physical brands improve operational efficiency and competitiveness, capturing transformation demand in the stock market.

This article details the recent wave of store closures and contractions across multiple brands, summarizes industry-wide problems, and offers reference for commercial real estate developers and retail platform operators adjusting their leasing and operating strategies and mitigating risk.

1. Shifting brand demand for platform locations: Luxury brands only retain locations in core commercial districts of core cities, reducing demand for stores in non-core areas and prioritizing supporting service capabilities at core sites. Emerging formats such as warehouse clubs and hard-discount community supermarkets have growing demand for locations matching their positioning.

2. Adjustments for leasing and operations: Platforms need to optimize their in-market brand mix, gradually reduce exposure to stagnating traditional brands and bubble-driven internet brands, and introduce experience-focused, high-value brands aligned with current consumer trends. They should also acknowledge merchants’ cost pressures, adjust rental policies appropriately, help merchants connect with resources to improve operational capabilities, and retain high-quality brands.

3. Risk mitigation: Platforms should be wary of capital-force-grown internet brands, which often close rapidly and leave platforms with vacancy losses. They should also monitor closure risks from the home furniture sector’s exposure to the housing downturn and the market exit risks from the saturated anime retail segment, and adjust their layout in advance to spread risk.

This paper documents the wave of store closures across China’s physical retail and food service sectors in the first half of 2024, maps out development status across formats, and summarizes new industry trends and problems, offering valuable reference material for industrial research.

1. New industry trends: China’s consumer market is undergoing profound structural change, broadly characterized by "strong service consumption, weak goods consumption." Rational consumption is now the mainstream, industry consolidation has accelerated amid stock competition, and mass exit is not limited to small and medium brands — a large number of leading legacy brands and top internet brands have also exited the market. Sector divergence is pronounced: traditional formats are declining, while new formats are growing rapidly.

2. New emerging industry problems: Capital intervention has forced the premature scaling of many brands, which expand rapidly before validating a profitable single-store model, leading to industry bubbles and subsequent mass exit. Legacy brands lag in updating their offerings, leading to a disconnect in brand perception, and emerging segments quickly become saturated and homogenized after a short period of unregulated growth.

3. Research implications: This wave of store closures provides a research sample for studying the development patterns of physical industries in the stock competition era. Future research can focus on capital’s impact on the physical industry, transformation paths for legacy brands, and sustainable growth models for new consumer brands, to provide reference for industrial policy formulation.