Franchise Operators Struggle as Meituan and Alibaba Densify Instant Neighborhood Depots

NextFin News —— Mei Lin’s phone begins its soft chime just after five on a recent morning in East Harbor. The basement space she rented a few months earlier already smells of cardboard and refrigerated air. She moves between the tall shelves by the light of a single hanging bulb, scanning barcodes on drinks, snacks, and household packs among more than five thousand items. Three to five minutes is the window she has allowed herself for each order before a courier arrives. She has not hired help. On some days her brother comes down the stairs to pack beside her; most days she works alone. The investment she placed into the lease, the fittings, and the first stock still sits heavy in her calculations. Daily orders hover around a hundred. Profit barely covers the basics. To keep the flow of traffic she has begun selling certain drinks for a single cent, knowing each one deepens the loss.

That basement, and hundreds like it, now form the visible edge of a quiet contest playing out across the city’s residential blocks and commercial strips. Instant neighborhood depots—small warehouses stocked in advance so that ordinary goods can reach a customer within minutes—have multiplied with striking speed. Meituan and Alibaba, platforms that once specialized in restaurant meals or long-distance packages, now treat dense, controllable near-field supply as essential infrastructure. The operators who fill the shelves, however, live a different arithmetic.

The People Who Keep the Shelves Moving

In the early hours and late evenings the work is relentless. Junhao, a young franchisee who opened his depot last summer after seeing polished case studies of quick returns, describes a routine that has compressed the original staffing plan of six or seven people down to three. Pickers walk twenty to thirty thousand steps in a twelve-hour rotation with no fixed end. Inventory must be watched, platform rules tracked, after-sales messages answered. The promised full-service support from the brand side largely dissolved once the doors opened. Promotion fees drain outward while commissions of fifteen to twenty percent leave little margin. A single order can arrive whose gross profit fails to cover the courier fee.

Mei and Junhao are not isolated cases. Conversations in operator groups and leasing offices return to the same pattern: initial outlays of several hundred thousand, optimistic projections of monthly income, then the discovery that visible costs—rent, utilities, stock—are only the surface. Invisible ones accumulate. Low-priced loss-leader items proliferate because traffic must be bought. When neighboring depots open within the same few kilometers, the same limited set of popular goods appears on every shelf. Price becomes the only remaining lever.

Mr. Shen, who has managed community warehouse leasing for several years, watches the cycle from the landlord’s side. Occupancy rates once climbed above ninety percent. Now the calls he dreads are the ones that begin with a request to terminate early. Some tenants last less than three months. Others simply vanish, leaving unpaid rent and unsold stock that takes days to clear. He has begun shortening lease terms and raising deposits. When he shows a new prospect around a vacant unit he often asks, almost as a warning, whether the visitor understands how quickly these operations can close.

Two Paths Toward the Same Grid

Meituan and Alibaba continue to expand the network. From their vantage the problem is not excess density but insufficient reliable supply. A large number of depots does not automatically produce accurate inventory, consistent assortment, or the ability to shape what reaches a customer in a given neighborhood at a given hour. Meituan, whose roots lie in rapid delivery, has layered self-operated fresh-goods operations such as Xiaoxiang Supermarket, branded convenience formats, and specialized vertical stores onto a broad outer ring of independently run instant depots. The self-operated pieces serve as living laboratories—testing which items move at which times, how deep inventory should sit, how to reduce waste—so that knowledge can later be offered back to the wider network. Plans call for the outer ring of flash depots alone to exceed one hundred thousand locations in the coming years.

Alibaba works in the opposite direction. It seeks to bring distant national inventories closer by authorizing partner-operated stores under shared brands such as Taobao Convenience Store, supplying systems, selection guidance, and traffic while leaving the physical assets and daily management with the local operator. Self-operated anchors including Hema and Tmall Supermarket provide reference standards and fill gaps, with additional independent front warehouses improving coverage density. The aim is the same: a lattice of stocked nodes close enough to customers that minutes, not days, become the normal measure of delivery.

Both approaches treat the franchise or authorized operator as a necessary accelerator. Building every node with company capital would slow the map and load the balance sheet with rent, labor, and spoilage. Social capital fills the gaps faster. The resulting grid grows. Whether every node inside it remains viable is a separate question.

Where the Pressure Settles

Demand for rapid local purchase is real and continues to widen. Yet the return on any single depot is far less certain. A typical location can serve only a radius of three to five kilometers. When new depots open inside that same circle, order volume does not expand in proportion. Goods remain similar. Operators respond with deeper discounts and heavier promotion spending. The loop tightens: without promotion the orders thin; with promotion the margins disappear. A rise in delivery fees, a few thousand extra spent on traffic, or a batch of goods that expire can erase a month’s result.

Operators who exit do not take the losses with them. Unsold stock, unpaid rent, and interrupted employment pass along the chain to landlords, suppliers, and staff. Platform density, in part, rests on this continuous trial and clearance. Opening a depot is straightforward. Sustaining one with adequate order density, sensible inventory depth, and controlled waste is not.

Both Meituan and Alibaba invest heavily in prediction tools that aim to forecast demand more accurately, refine replenishment, and reduce empty courier trips. Better forecasts can lower waste and stockouts. They cannot, by themselves, manufacture additional local demand or guarantee that the efficiency gains reach the operator who carries the inventory risk. If the primary benefits accrue higher in the system while the residual uncertainty remains at the depot floor, technological improvement alone will not stabilize the nodes.

Mei still answers the morning chimes. She has adjusted her assortment, cut further on labor, and watched neighboring units change hands. On quieter afternoons she sometimes stands in the aisle between the drink cases and the snack shelves and calculates how many more months the current order volume can support the rent. Meituan and Alibaba continue to map new locations. The basement lights stay on. The question that settles over the network is no longer how quickly the grid can be drawn, but whether enough of its individual points can remain open long enough for the infrastructure to become durable.