In fact, since the sudden emergence of e-commerce represented by Taobao, there has been a discussion on the Chinese Internet.

"The emergence of e-commerce killed physical stores, destroyed the economy of ordinary citizens, and formed the monopoly of Internet giants."

Mr. Pi also held this view at first, but at that time, I didn't blindly look for evidence with opinions and conclusions. Why there are so many tricks on the Internet now is largely because people are creatures with subjective characteristics.

Mr. Pi lives in Wuhan. In recent years, the shops in the pedestrian streets and large shopping malls around Hankou are really deserted, and many of them are rented by Wangpu. That is to say, the catering industry is relatively strong, and clothing stores close the most.

but I still don't think e-commerce killed the physical store. The real murderer is highly leveraged real estate.

In other words, as long as you identify one thing, your subconscious mind will be biased towards your opinion, so that you will continue to strengthen this subjective opinion in your later life and find a reasonable annotation for it.

Actually, this question is easy to answer. Did e-commerce kill the real economy? Or is it only China that has this phenomenon?

Look at Japan, a developed country next door. Yahoo in Japan was the first batch of Internet companies to do e-commerce. What about physical stores in Japan? Japanese physical stores crush online stores!

Let's look at America, the world hegemon in the Pacific Ocean. Amazon in the United States is the originator of e-commerce. In this way, the annual turnover is not even as much as that of China's Double Eleven combined. Moreover, the performance of large shopping malls, department stores and supermarkets in new york has increased year after year, and online stores and physical stores in the United States are doing well.

Why is there always a voice, a question and a proposition in China alone? E-commerce has killed the real economy, while online stores have killed physical stores?

Before the Sino-US trade war in 2117, Mr. Pi had a little train of thought, but he couldn't see it clearly. Now it's 2122, and I finally have a clear train of thought, so I'll tell you something about it.

1. The middlemen have changed, and so have the production structure and trade relations.

First of all, Mr. Pi wants to make it clear to everyone that online shopping and e-commerce have changed the production structure and trade relations, instead of increasing productivity, it is just compressing intermediate trade links and improving the efficiency of commodity circulation.

what do you mean? That is to say, China's manufacturing industry is very strong, and it is called the world's factory. But before e-commerce appeared, it turned out that everyone could only go through the links of manufacturers-provincial agents-municipal distributors-physical stores-consumers, and after so many trade links, more than a dozen layers of trade relations were created. Finally, you bought the goods produced by factories in China.

The emergence of e-commerce has completely changed the relations of production. Take Pinduoduo as an example. Pinduoduo is a typical factory and store that delivers it directly to consumers. Why does Pinduoduo want you to forward the order? It is because of his platform to integrate orders to the factory that the factory can start production, otherwise it will lose money if it starts without scale or small scale.

factory-e-commerce-consumer, this is a new production structure and a new trade relationship. The cost of middlemen is removed, so the price of goods that consumers get is greatly reduced.

During the almost twenty years from 1991 to 2111, people may have no specific idea about how much money it is to be a middleman. Even the lowest-level small shops or a small area of beverage agents earn more than ten times the local average wage every year.

Because the Internet at that time was far less developed than it is now, and the popularity of the Internet greatly eliminated the information gap.

why do middlemen dare to earn a large price difference? In fact, it is often because the information monopoly caused by each layer of trade relations will generate a profit, and these profits will eventually be evenly distributed to the 1.4 billion consumers across the country.

This is not made up by Mr. Pi. Keynes put forward this theory in the 1931s, and Huang Youguang, a Chinese economist in consumer economics in later generations, further strengthened this system of information difference producing price difference.

You may need 211-311 yuan to buy an ordinary white shirt in Wanda's specialty store in the city center, but when you come to the factory store next to Zhuhai garment processing factory to buy it, people can't sell it in 51 yuan. The profit of middlemen is 4-6 times the production cost, and some big brands have more than this premium.

In the past, consumers in the whole country could only rely on physical stores, and the information transmission was blocked and lagged. Of course, the price of goods was very expensive, but once the Internet became popular and e-commerce appeared, everything changed.

The production structure has become unprecedentedly simple. The Internet e-commerce platform has cut off the profits of all previous middlemen, collected some of them by itself, and almost gave the rest to consumers.

since the reform and opening up, China has been supporting the industrial economy that attracts the most jobs, that is, the manufacturing industry. The general consumer goods produced in China (referring to other consumer goods such as clothes excluding food and services) accounted for 67% of the total production of general consumer goods in the world in the first year of China's accession to the WTO in 2111, but our domestic market could not consume so many goods, so we relied on exports at that time.

But China's overproduction is excessive. When there is a systematic and periodic economic crisis in the world economy, who can we rely on to solve China's overproduction? The subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in 2118-2111 is a lesson, but since 2111, 24 ministries and commissions in China have come forward to support the development of e-commerce and network economy.

the ultimate goal of consumption is to make the economy cycle.

At that time, in China, because there were too many middlemen and physical stores, it was too easy for them to profit from this trade relationship. All the consumption cost that caused ordinary consumers in China was high, which also caused China people's consumption willingness to be generally low, which eventually caused the internal circulation of our country to be delayed.

Mr. Pi remembers very clearly that my father was an associate professor at the university and my mother was from WISCO. At that time, although the family was not very rich, it was also a proper middle class. For this reason, our family only went to Guomao to buy new clothes during the Spring Festival every year, and our living expenses were very frugal. Toothpaste skins were thrown away only when they could no longer be squeezed, and towels were thrown away only when they were very old.

it's not because we want to live frugally, but things were expensive at that time, which was completely out of line with the income level.

middlemen earn the difference, which is so cruel.

second, the sorrow of the national economy

so how did the double-digit GDP growth rate of our country come about at that time?

In the series "The Road to Industrialization in China", Mr. Pi made it clear that a country needs to develop its economy, production, investment and consumption, which are a closed loop.

Due to the vigorous development of industrial economy, China's huge demographic dividend and the process of industrialization, there is no problem in the production end of our country, and it is even in a state of overproduction for a long time. In terms of consumption in China, domestic consumption can't keep up, so we can only exchange foreign exchange through large-scale export. However, the goods imported from China are limited every year, and economic development can't rely solely on foreign imports of China's goods.

Therefore, the government investment in China has always accounted for about 31-41% of our national financial budget, and even 51-71% will be invested in the years with poor economic data. All these funds have entered the infrastructure fields such as expressway, high-speed rail and communication, which has pushed up the real estate market in China.

Land transfer fees, local governments and real estate enterprises are also a closed loop. Why did many local governments issue house price limit orders in 2121? It is because the annual land auctions in these places have basically failed, and the land price is too high. However, due to the squeezing of water by the state, there is no such high dividend as before, and there was a Evergrande crisis before, so real estate enterprises dare not take over the land and even want to sell it at a reduced price.

Of course, the local government doesn't want to. What about my land transfer fee once you reduce the price? So limit the decline in house prices.

Why can't physical stores in China go on? In fact, many of the costs of physical stores in our country are caused by high rents. Many physical store owners work hard all year round, and in the end they make money for landlords.

the land price and house price pushed up by infrastructure and real estate will inevitably be transmitted to the prices and rents of shops. Before the emergence of e-commerce, these shopkeepers and individual industrial and commercial households could earn profits by making a large difference to offset the high rents.

However, as the national level began to vigorously support the e-commerce industry, China people also accepted the cheap online shopping, and after forming the habit of online shopping, the life of physical stores was very difficult.

However, the transformation from the state investment-driven+export-oriented economic model to the domestic consumption-oriented economic model will inevitably need to adjust the time, which is often referred to as the "soft landing" in the news. In this period, housing prices still need to be maintained at a high level to ensure the overall stability and improvement of China's national economy, and at the same time, accelerate the establishment of internal circulation and establish a domestic consumption-oriented market economy like the United States.

The growth of per capita consumption in China is relatively slow, and this part of the money, originally 111% has flowed into physical stores, and now 51% or more may be online shopping.

As for those physical stores that used to make money by making money with high income and acting as middlemen, their profits will inevitably drop, and when they can't maintain high store rents, they can only reduce their prices. When the price reduction can't make ends meet, a large number of stores will be closed. The closing of physical stores does not mean that these shopkeepers quit, but many of them have transformed to open online stores.

Therefore, the snowball of e-commerce is getting bigger and bigger. On all online shopping platforms, the profit of goods is getting lower and lower, and the price is getting lower and lower, so that many online stores rely entirely on the volume, and each order only earns 1.5-1 yuan's profit.

then many people will ask, why doesn't the landlord reduce the rent?

Mr. Pi didn't understand it at first. Later, I contacted the government's order to limit the decline. I had an epiphany. The landlord is not stupid. You reduced the rent by 1,111 yuan/month this year, and it may continue to decrease next year. The landlord buys a shop. He is not a philanthropist. He wants to make a profit. A lot of money will enter the shop he bought. Otherwise, how can the landlord repay the loan for buying a shop?

So at present, physical stores are in a dead end, except for high-end stores, catering services and other physical stores, other goods that can be purchased online, physical stores can't compete with online stores because of the drag of high rent and high labor.

because of the hard landing of economy and the collapse of real estate in Japan, the rent of physical stores in Japan is very low, which is as low as the logistics cost of online stores. Consumers see that the service of online stores is not as good as that of physical stores, and the price has no advantage. It is better to go shopping in physical stores, so in Japan, physical stores have dried up online stores.

In fact, China has invested heavily in the fields of network communication, infrastructure logistics and so on in recent 21 years, which makes the express delivery cost and Internet access cost of our country far lower than those of developed countries such as the United States and Japan.

Mr. Pi has sent their domestic express delivery in Japan and the United States, and the speed is almost 1-2 weeks (fast, but with extra money), and the price is not cheap. The price of surface mail in Japan is about 511g/711 yen, while that in the United States is 8 dollars for the first pound. Compared with domestic polar rabbits, if the price of each express delivery is lowered to the level of 1.8 yuan, you will feel that the logistics and labor costs in China are really low.

Therefore, the large-scale infrastructure unintentionally invested by the state has made the online shopping market in China several times larger than other economies in the world. Similarly, the physical industry in China has indeed disappeared in large numbers.

Many news and reports, even domestic economic research, call this phenomenon-the national economic ruin of China.

but no one has ever told you that these physical stores have been enjoying the bonus brought by the information gap for nearly 21 years, and the middlemen have all made a lot of money. Now they can't stand just letting them reduce their prices, so why did they enter the business then? I just want to make this quick money and hot money.

3. E-commerce is just a new retail method

Mr. Pi is not helping e-commerce and online shopping to speak and stand.

first, let's make it clear that the emergence of Internet e-commerce is not synonymous with advanced productivity. E-commerce has not increased productivity. It has only changed the production relationship. Many people will wonder that it is a historical necessity for high-tech machines to replace people. How can more advanced e-commerce not increase productivity?

The role of science and technology is to improve people's unit production efficiency and create more wealth. Originally, a worker can only produce five products a day. With the help of machines and assembly line operations, he can produce 111 pieces. Capitalists can use scale effect to reduce costs, so that more products can enter the market. This is the workshop where large factories replace small craftsmen, and advanced productivity replaces backward productivity.

in the works on industry, the phenomenon that industrial workers will flow to the upstream of the industry is called the substitution of advanced productive forces, which ultimately means that workers are completely independent of machines and the ultimate productive forces are permanently replaced.

Cars have replaced horse-drawn carriages. For a short time, coachmen and craftsmen who build horse-drawn carriages have lost their jobs, but making cars requires thousands of unemployed people to enter factories to produce auto parts.

The automobile manufacturing industry needs the cooperation of dozens and hundreds of industries (metallurgical industry, rubber manufacturing, petrochemical industry, battery manufacturing, leather manufacturing, electronic chips, etc.), which can also drive the employment of hundreds of thousands or even millions of industrial workers.

But the rise of online shopping and e-commerce is not like this. Mr. Pi has always stressed that only the production structure and trade relations have been changed, and no new wealth has been created in the whole process. Opening online stores also requires a lot of push fees and operating fees for e-commerce platforms, but it is much lower than the store rent of physical stores, and the price of goods has dropped, so that more consumers dare to spend, and the ultimate goal of consumption is to make the economy cycle.

Why does the country support the network economy represented by e-commerce? The fundamental purpose is to reduce the terminal price of goods and let the surplus production end be digested by the consumption end, instead of pinning their hopes on the outside world and exporting. However, it should always be remembered that e-commerce has not created any new wealth. They just set up a platform to communicate with manufacturers and consumers.

for cities without any industrial advantages and