Update: I joined a retail-tech startup in Tokyo as its first Corporate Strategy Lead after a short honeymoon period in the wall-streety world (PE). We strive to transform the online retail (primarily grocery & drug stores) space to make the shopping and operation experience as smooth as possible; in short — we help you get your daily bananas cheap and easy!
After joining a new gig, I got a mandate to dive into the actual operation, i.e., supermarket. I did have experience working in the restaurant as a cashier or server when I previously worked for a restaurant company. That was helpful, but working in the supermarket was a completely new experience. Here are some takeaways from picking vegetables for two weeks.
First of all: how online grocery works (at least in Japan)
There are three steps to how online grocery works. See the chart below.
It’s physically tough
There are generally two types of operating models. (a) Center type: you can probably imagine from the operation of how Amazon works. Supermarkets own or rent ample Center storage and do the picking and packing or together at the centre. (b) Store type: The other type might be more common at the moment in Japan. Using a cart or basket, you would pick the vegetables or bananas or any other items in the actual store space. You would pick the items from the same place where regular customers would do and then bring them back to the backyard of the supermarkets, pack, and ship them.
There is physical pain throughout this process. You are standing and walking for 4–5 hours non-stop, and sometimes you might get an order of 14 bottles of 2-litre water, which equals 30 kg (≒66lbs). It is heavy even for a relatively healthy and young man like myself. Or, at the end of the packing, you need to check if the numbers of boxes are correct. You need to scan each barcode on the boxes and see if it matches the actual number of packages. You would walk along with a pile of boxes, moving ups and downs, almost like a squat on the gym. I regularly work out and am generally healthy, but I did feel pain in my back two days after I started in the supermarket. In reality, most people working in the back of the supermarket are women in 40 to 50; imagine how tough that might be for those people.
I work for a company that provides a solution that enables partners (supermarkets) to run these grocery operations, so we’re not the ones who pick vegetables or bananas in everyday life. Knowing how physically tough it is not directly critical to developing products. However, knowing how physically tough it is helps us create connections between the people in operation and the corporate people of the partner (supermarkets) side. When they submit a request or claim, what they seek is a solution, but sometimes it might just be the empathy to the pain they feel in everyday life. Indeed they are the ones who face end-users who sometimes provide unreasonable requests (e.g., “this avocado does not look good, so please come to my house and replace it,” when it looks perfectly fine). Doing the work (picking & packing) together while chit-chatting sometimes open another communication path that may improve the communication (& decrease communication cost)
Adding another variable to your toolbox
I work in a corporate strategy role at a retail-tech company. My key competencies and primary mission include drawing corporate strategy, conducting financial analysis, or designing the monetisation model. Working in the supermarket was probably out of the scope of JD of Corporate Strategy role, and it may not directly impact the mission mentioned earlier.
However, knowing the reality in the field help tremendously to improve the clarity of the strategy. It also helps to verify the actions that you craft. I felt the same thing when I worked as a portfolio manager of a restaurant company on the west coast in the US. I had all the numbers from a financial perspective and was trying to figure out a better portion control method that impacts the food cost. The issue was that we seem to serve more fish (e.g. salmon or tuna) than the standard portion, which is the most significant food cost you might imagine. It may look like an excessive marginal portion for each scoop, but that could easily add the food cost by a couple of percentages.
Looking at the spreadsheet and operation flow, serving the standard portion did not seem to be a super complicated job, so I wondered why that was happening. The standard operation was to cut the top of the scoop when serving to keep the consistency on the portion. So I flew from Japan to Cal and went into the store and experienced a full day as a server to figure out.
When facing the spreadsheet, I was unaware of the mental implication for servers of cutting the top of the scoop when you have your customers in front of them — people working in the restaurant industry naturally like serving people and providing good services. When you slice the top of the scoop and keep the tuna or salmon in standard portions, it looks stingy, and some customers complain about it. It makes sense to control the potion by slicing the top of the scoop, but that would cause mental pressure on the people in the store. So we ended up changing the scoop into a smaller size so that, no matter how much tuna or salmon you put on the scoop, it won’t go over the standard portion and eventually help us keep the bottom-line that we want secure.
I believe we should build strategy top-down without being biased from the complex phenomenon in the operational side of the businesses. However, facing the actual customers or people in the field than facing spreadsheets do help us build a strategy that is tangible and actionable.
Time in the supermarket has not helped me to come up with another fancy strategy ye. Still, it certainly helped me understand how our dollars (*yen) are coming from end-users, store operations, and eventually to us (linking to the point I mentioned to the flow of money). I also felt how much room for improvement each cost line item you see on spreadsheets has, which makes me think I got access to other variables.
Speaking of variables — not just knowing each variable’s elasticity and having the capability to hit those variables was a tremendous secondary takeaway. When there’s an issue with an operation, for instance, due to a shortage of people, I could actually come in and help it (I still have the uniform in my closet). From the macro point of view, there is not much economic impact on it by just adding 1 FTE (=yourself) in-store operation, but it could improve communication or set the tone of the relationship.
Often, a corporate strategy job is not tangible in the short run and vague compared to other jobs that impact businesses in everyday life. So it is a good feeling that we could hit the line items on financials directly (by picking another banana).
It’s fun
Corporate jobs, including corporate strategy or other white-collar jobs, sometimes make it hard to feel that you contribute to the business itself or the customers. Whether in the restaurant or the supermarket, operation work could be rewarding. At the end of the day, you feel the physical exhaustion, and you know you took part in the process of picking and delivering some vegetables to those who want to have the grocery items from the store but did not want to or could not commute the grocery stores. Apart from the dollar figure that vegetables generated, that’s pretty rewarding and particularly in this remote condition that could help you go to bed with a slightly better feeling than yesterday that you did something meaningful. Also, it is fun to have the connection, do team-play with people who you may not have had many relationships in your life (e.g., me + 7–8 of 40–50 yo part-time women)
