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7-ELEVEN
Kalyn Tavares
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Kalyn Tavares
BUS-101
Mr. Sale
18 November 2016
7-Eleven’s mission is to cater to the needs of convenience oriented customers by providing a variety of goods. The franchise wanted to accomplish this by finding locations near very congregated areas such as, street corners as well as locate near rural areas where the population density was low. The layout of the store was to resemble that of a supermarket and once successful in United States, 7-Eleven decided to expand overseas and one place they located to was Taiwan.
Taiwan is an island in East Asia with the second largest population density and slightly resembles the United States in the fact that they are not patient and prefer convenience. When 7-Eleven first moved to Taiwan the stores were more compact while still resembling the original aesthetic by having frozen food, fast food, cigarettes and drinks. However, the parent company in Taiwan, PCSC, wanted to provide more options than the typical convenient food, they wanted to start selling local fresh made delicacies like, tea egg, baozi, luwei, fantuan and biandang. The company did test marketing of these delicacies, within the article, it states, “the success in marketing local food led to the decision to extend to the customer convenience in two ways, moving beyond selling packaged food to selling fresh food and selling products that could be consumed immediately.” For the franchise to continue providing these types of services they must change their supply operations management. First, the company had to expand their layout since they were now dealing with fresh food and must acquire equipment to keep it fresh. Then, they had to purchase the equipment such as, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves and have enough prepping space for employees to properly prepare the food. They must also make their supply chain management more efficient by providing more operation managers to stand by and gather the inventory because they are now depending on other producers to provide them with essential products that must arrive in a timely manner or else the produce could go bad. By 7-Eleven expanding to these operations their company expenses became cheaper and resulted in more goods to be sold since consumers enjoyed these delicacies. Since more goods were being sold, it generated a profit for the company to expand.
7-Eleven did much more than just provide fresh food to their customers they also provided services that could accommodate to people’s busy schedules. Taiwan’s 7-Eleven’s establish taxi services. This service allowed 7-Eleven to expand to customer needs by locating a transportation service in their facility. The article states, “… provision for calling for a taxi service for the handicapped which included a discount … people with hearing problems could use the ibon to call for a service … the store kept a log in book for those who might lose their belongings during their ride.” This taxi service became such an essential, because it was segmented to individuals who needed much more than just a quick ride including those who could not help themselves as well as provide more convenience to a Taiwanese’s work day. They provided quality, efficiency and flexibility to their customers by having sympathetic individuals who would ensure safety and consideration of others. This service could work in the United States not only because many taxi services take approximately 15 minutes to arrive, which can become an inconvenience, but also the service could provide more efficient transportation for an individual by taking routes that have lighter traffic as well as have considerate drivers who would get customers to their location in a timely manner.
An additional service Taiwan’s 7-Eleven’s provided was an ibon that allowed customers to do daily activities such as, order online, pay bills, and update personal information (car licenses, driver’s licenses, etc.). The passage states, “the ecommerce platform installed at each 7-Eleven store was being used as a conduit for delivery and pick up for any product … the most popular product was books …”. Taiwanese people have very productive days, adding new technology and cloud servers gave customers a new experience when going to the store. This service provided new IT process and operations that allowed Taiwanese people to order and pay for the item at that moment. The ibon also allowed the customers to rate restaurants, movies and shows. For the ibon to come to the United States however, would not work because the standard of living is more advanced than Taiwan. A good percentage of Americans thrive on IT to do daily activities, such as these on their smartphones. Not to mention when it comes to personal information, process control on servers may be unstable and many Americans do not trust unstable servers to provide personal information on.