Day 2: Balik Kerja

I woke in the morning quite worried. I believe that my weak Singaporean stomach could not handle the ice that was in my iced milk tea yesterday. No way I'm going out for 2 weeks over ice man. Thankfully my stomach problems only lasted a day.

I walked in MM Durian once again, and I wanted a perspective different from a kasir. So I decided to take a walk. Walking down the street I realized that there were about 4-5 "Kedai Runcit" or Provision stores in the same street as MM Durian. In Singapore, 7 eleven basically cannibalized every provision store they could find, even if it was at the cost of their own outlets. However, trying to buy out every provision store here is clearly not feasible. So it got me thinking again about yesterday's question. What would draw someone into MM Durian instead of these provision stores that actually had similar stock, albeit a smaller variety.

I walked back in the store, and decided to start thinking about why I love walking into convenience stores compared to the older mama shops. I believe it was because everything MN about it was pleasant. The displays looked pleasant. The cleanliness was pleasant. Air con temperature was pleasant. Lighting was pleasant. I had choice. Occasionally I had deals I could choose from. Oh the little joys of purchasing from stores. So if I were to turn MM Durian into my dream store, what would I do. I wanted information first.

So I spent the rest of the day poring through report logs on the system and sending it back to my computer to view it later at night. I wanted to know where the money was coming from as part of this quintessential process Cik Farid calls "cash flow". So of the hundred over products I see on the shelves, which were moving? Which were there? (It was quite surprising when some of the items on the shelves was actually dusty. It must have been there for ages).

I looked at profit margins, I looked at flows and understood how this reports can help - because it is a review of what we're trying out in terms of variety. I understood changes in the peak periods for MM Durian and understood what people want. (MM makes a killing off bottled water).

So for today, I learnt the relationship between the store and consumers. I understood the concept of demand and supply - seeing it before me as people bought snacks and other miscellaneous goods. Time to find out more, so that night I took to try researching how convenience stores are in hopes of understanding more to bring me to my hope to find out how sales can improve in MM Durian.