The masses have a fair yardstick in their hearts.

What do bulk snack stores fear the most?

It is probably not overpricing, but making consumers feel that they cannot even figure out how much they have bought.

The beef jerky priced at 64.58 yuan only weighs 17.29 yuan after re-weighing.

In Henan, a consumer saw the total price showed 111 yuan at checkout, felt something was wrong, asked for a re-weighing, and the price turned out to be 64.8 yuan.

The difference between the two amounts is far more than a few maos.

Such incidents happened right at chain bulk snack stores like Zhao Yiming and Haoxianglai.

The most successful thing this industry has done is to turn low-price consumption into a habit. Shelves are packed with various snacks, under a unified pricing system. Consumers pick what they want on their own, no need to think too much, and can go to checkout after walking around with a bag.

Yet once the weighing scale malfunctions, the entire consumption logic changes completely overnight.

Several complaints have emerged one after another, prompting more people to share similar experiences. Regulators have also moved quickly to launch special metering rectification campaigns at a number of mainstream bulk snack stores.

A single weighing scale has suddenly become the most noteworthy thing in this industry.

I. A Weighing Scale That Supports an Entire Business

Zhao Yiming, Haoxianglai and other bulk snack retailers sell products at low prices, which are backed by a highly standardized system. Every link, from product selection and procurement, warehouse turnover, to in-store display and checkout settlement, is calculated for maximum efficiency.

But this complex system only presents a single weighing scale to consumers. They cannot see the supply chain behind the scenes, and only decide whether to trust the numbers displayed on the screen.

There is a very interesting contradiction in this business: products are highly non-standardized, but the retail experience must be highly standardized. Consumers enter the store, select products, put them in bags, weigh them, and pay. The whole process is as simple as buying a bottle of water, with only a few steps.

Behind this simplicity is the joint support of procurement, warehousing, store management, pricing system and digital systems.

For pre-packaged food, the price is printed on the package long ago, leaving no room for disputes. For bulk snacks, everything relies on the electronic scale, which converts piles of products in different shapes into a price recognized by both parties.

The scale is not just a piece of equipment for bulk snack stores. It is the smallest piece of trust infrastructure of this entire business.

Consumers neither know the reasonable unit price of a piece of beef jerky, nor can they tell whether the bag of sunflower seeds is full enough by feel. The only thing they can trust is the green or red glowing number on the screen.

The gap between 64.58 yuan and 17.29 yuan is obviously absurd, but what is more thought-provoking is that once consumers begin to doubt the scale, their suspicion will spread like ripples: first they doubt the store, then the brand, and finally they will even have the thought that "all bulk snack stores are ripping people off".

This kind of trust damage only needs to happen once.

II. The Larger the Scale, the Harder the Last Mile

This is why "giving short weight" is extremely sensitive in the bulk snack industry. The industry has expanded extremely rapidly in the past few years, with leading brands operating thousands of stores covering vast areas from first-tier cities to county towns.

Consumers have formed a very solid perception: large stores, abundant products, low prices, and extremely convenient shopping experience. This model works entirely thanks to scale: the more stores there are, the lower the shared supply chain cost; the larger the procurement volume, the stronger the bargaining power against manufacturers; with a well-known brand, new stores will never lack customers after opening.

But the flip side of the coin is that the larger the scale, the harder it is to refine management granularity.

What is more troublesome is that the scaling of the bulk snack industry is built on rapid replication. The headquarters is responsible for setting standards, stores are responsible for implementing standards, and consumers verify standards at the last link. If any deviation occurs in any intermediate link, all the previous supply chain efficiency, procurement scale and brand influence will not help.

The headquarters can make the price lists of 10,000 stores exactly the same, but it is difficult to ensure that every number given by 10,000 scales is equally trustworthy.

If a directly-operated store has a problem, the headquarters can send people to handle it on the same day. But after the chain expands to thousands of stores, the headquarters is faced with hundreds of franchisees, various store managers and staff, and completely different local operating environments.

The headquarters can stipulate how goods are purchased, how prices are set, and which model of scale to use. But in the actual scenario of hundreds of transactions every day, every weighing operation is completed by specific staff at a specific store. This is the "last mile" that is hardest to manage for all chain businesses.

There is always a human factor standing between the system and its execution.

Consumers see the brand, but experience the store. An inaccurate scale can hardly be interpreted as a slip of hand by a temporary worker. In the minds of consumers, it is naturally attributed to the brand itself.

This is the wall that all large chain enterprises will hit sooner or later. Brands can scale up with capital and speed, but trust cannot be replicated automatically just by opening more stores.

III. Bulk Snack Stores Sell Certainty

If you dig deeper into the bulk snack business, you will find that what they really sell to consumers is not just snacks, but also a sense of certainty.

You roughly know what products are available, what the price level is, and take it for granted that bulk weighing will not have major problems. This sense of certainty is the foundation on which bulk snack stores turn a non-standardized market into a chain business.

This is exactly the most valuable part of the bulk snack business model: using a standardized retail assembly line to handle an inherently fragmented and non-standardized commodity market.

That is why what this industry needs to guard most is not viral hit products, nor more favorable promotion labels, but consumers' overall trust in the entire transaction system.

A few grams missing from a piece of beef jerky only affects one transaction; if a scale is found to be inaccurate, it will shake consumers' confidence in the entire "weighing-pricing" rule.

Consumers will start to wonder if they have been overcharged for every bag they bought before.

The scope of impact of these two situations is not even on the same level.

IV. After Low Prices, Competition Shifts to Trust

In the early stage, the bulk snack industry competed on efficiency: whoever has lower procurement cost, faster warehousing and distribution, can open stores more densely. After the industry enters the scaling stage, most efficiency advantages will gradually become basic capabilities.

The reason why consumers will keep coming back will become simpler and simpler: when prices are similar, which store do I prefer to shop at?

At this point, trust begins to become extremely valuable.

Low prices can be replicated easily, but peace of mind cannot.

To this day, low prices are no longer the exclusive weapon of any single bulk snack brand. Supply chain efficiency, store density and product selection capability are still moats, but these capabilities will gradually become industry standards, leaving no obvious gap between peers.

The long-term reason for consumers to stay will quietly shift from "which is cheaper" to "which is more reassuring to shop at". For snacks priced at a few yuan or more than ten yuan, many people are not very sensitive to a 0.5 or 1 yuan price difference, but they are willing to pay an invisible cost: the confidence that the store will not cheat them on weight.

This trust is the most valuable intangible asset of a chain brand.

Of course, we should not deny the entire bulk snack model just because of a few problematic incidents. According to the data from the special inspection in Baotou, only 1 out of 284 electronic price scales was found to be problematic, which is more of a warning rather than a widespread collapse of the entire industry.

What really deserves attention is that the more successful a business model is, the more trust consumers will place in it; the more trust they give, the higher the requirements for the underlying rules will be.

Consumers may not remember the taste of the bag of preserved plums they bought last week, but they will most likely remember a bad experience of being ripped off, especially such a stupid and upsetting operation as "giving short weight".

For an enterprise, you can own a sophisticated digital middle platform, impressive financing track record, and ambitious 10,000-store plan, but when consumers stand in front of the counter, they will ultimately stare at the numbers on the scale.

If the three numbers of weight, unit price and total price do not match, all the previous auras will fail instantly.

V. Open Stores Out, and Keep Standards In

The real test for the bulk snack industry in the next stage lies right here.

Opening stores does not equal completing scaling. Real scaling means that no matter which store a consumer walks into, they can get roughly the same experience.

This consistency covers products, prices, services, and most importantly, the basic accuracy of metering. It sounds like a basic skill, but it is the hardest line of defense to guard after all chain businesses grow large.

A brand with 5,000 stores means 5,000 consumer touchpoints at the same time. The headquarters is getting further and further away from the front line, but the brand is getting closer and closer to consumers. This seems to be a natural paradox of chain business, but it is actually the touchstone of the brand's core capability.

Consumers will not automatically trust the brand just because the headquarters has a perfect inspection system. What they trust is whether the scale right in front of them is accurate.

Therefore, what a bulk snack enterprise really needs to take good care of is not only the product turnover efficiency and sales per square meter reports, but also whether consumers have reasons to continue to trust the brand every time a transaction happens.

The larger the brand, the heavier the trust placed on it, and the more valuable the bargaining chip of trust is.

There is indeed a scale in the hearts of the public. It does not only weigh a few taels of snacks, but also measures whether a store is worth visiting again, whether a brand is worth trusting again, and whether a business model is truly committed to providing low prices, or just using low prices as a gimmick.

For bulk snack stores, what really needs to be calibrated is never limited to the electronic scales in the stores, but also the scale in consumers' minds.

Once that scale goes wrong, what is lost is far more than the price difference of a few yuan, but the hard-earned reputation of the entire industry.

Words Beyond the Layout:

In the end, business competition often boils down to things that seem very trivial.

Is one jin exactly one jin? Is one yuan exactly one yuan? Are the promised services delivered as required?

Consumers cannot understand the supply chain, nor will they study the management system of a company. To judge an enterprise, they often only need a very small contact experience.

This is also the trouble for large companies.

The larger the scale, the further away from consumers, the more specific consumers' judgment on it will be. A company's values, management capability and organizational efficiency will eventually be reflected in a cashier, a machine, and a receipt.

A weighing scale looks very small, but it is something that consumers can verify directly.

Therefore, what is really hard to replicate is never the stores, nor the low prices, but the ability to make a consumer trust you at the first store, and still be willing to trust you at the 1000th store.

This is probably the unavoidable lesson that all chain businesses have to learn after growing large enough:

It is not difficult to expand the business to a large scale. What is difficult is to scale up the trust itself.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Beyond the Layout", written by Ban Jun, and published with authorization from 36Kr.