Embedded Live: Survival Strategies Of Community Stores

With the development of economic globalization, the generation of e-commerce which represented by the network, and the emergence of comprehensive supermarkets have a great impacts on the traditional mode of small shop. They take advantage of the characteristic, such as timeliness, widespread and convenience to continuously occupy the consumer market. So the community stores are caught in dilemma. At the same time, the increased operating costs like the city planning and rising rents also bring a lot of threaten to the survival of the community stores. In this dilemma, what kind of business strategy should be taken by the community stores and how to win the market in the competition is the main problem that will be explored by this article. Around this basic problem, the article will use the social survey method to research a case of W Town, MinHang District, ShangHai. By interviews of different community groups and with Granovetter's theory of embeddedness as the main interpretation framework, from the sociology perspective this research wants to find the process that stores integrated into the community.This article is divided into six parts:The first chapter is introduction. In this chapter, for raising the question, the author first describes the plight of community stores and introduces the choice of object and research method, then reviews the theory of domestic and international. From chapterⅡ, this article comes into the main part——the survival strategies of community stores. Chapter II describes the living environments of community stores from two aspects. One is natural environment, the other is social environment. From the beginning of chapterⅢ, we start to research how these stores use the embedded theory to live in the community, from the mutually beneficial relationship (ChapterⅢ) to trust relationship (ChapterⅣ), and last up for the emotional dependency (ChapterⅤ). Through the formation of progressive relationships, community stores become an essential part of the whole community life. Also this survival strategy lets the community stores take a place in the fierce competition. This close relationship brings stability of economic benefits to the community stores and also becomes the magic strategy for it to live. ChapterVI of this article discusses from the theoretical level and leads the conclusion.From this research we can find that community composition, culture, public activities and rules all have a crucial impact to the development of community stores. The community stores embed in the community background mainly through establishing all kinds of relationships. In this process, it contains both structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness. The later is more important. This embedding process is dynamic, community stores must adjust its survival strategies according to the different situation.