Social media buzz, value pricing drive foot traffic; snack sales up 65.3% during 4-day event
"Try one more. Got it. Can you carry it?"
At E-mart's Mapo branch in Seoul on Sunday evening, the conversation among shoppers was unusually focused. People huddled together, studying the geometry of their snack towers and debating how to add one more box without toppling the pile. Every few minutes, someone would lift their stack and test whether it could survive the walk to the checkout.
Those who had built the tallest towers became impromptu consultants. Kim Jo-eun, 30, said she had done her homework before arriving. "I watched videos on Instagram showing how to stack as many as possible and prepared carefully," she said. "You can buy a lot of snacks at a low price, and the stacking itself is fun."
E-mart's "unlimited pick-and-stack" event, revived after an eight-year hiatus, has been a resounding success. The promotion — returning four months after its first revival — lets shoppers stack as many Lotte Wellfood snacks and Harim The Mishik instant rice packs as they can carry, all for a flat fee of 25,000 won (about $16) regardless of quantity.
Interest remained strong on the final day. Harim The Mishik instant rice sold out ahead of schedule, with supplies exhausted on Saturday — a day early. Jung Jin-ah, 51, said she had made a special trip to the store just to stack snacks. "I can share them with family and people around me, which is great," she said.
The event has also gone viral on social media. Instagram and YouTube have been flooded with videos of shoppers showing off towering stacks of snacks and instant rice. Value for money is a key draw: snacks priced at 1,300 to 1,500 won each can be stacked in large numbers, making the math attractive.
The strategy behind the event is straightforward: bring people back to physical stores. With online shopping continuing to erode hypermarket traffic, E-mart is betting that experiential events can reverse the trend. Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy data on major retailer sales show the scale of the challenge — hypermarket sales fell 15.2 percent year-on-year in March and 6.6 percent in April.
Snack sales during the four-day event, which ran Thursday through Sunday, surged 65.3 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. The previous edition, held Jan. 29 through Feb. 4, exceeded its sales target by 150 percent, with snack sales up 31 percent over the same stretch the prior year.
Lee Hong-ju, a professor of consumer economics at Sookmyung Women's University, said the event taps into more than a bargain hunt. "The pick-and-stack event offers consumers a playful challenge, a sense of achievement and strong value all at once — it is experiential consumption," Lee said. "Differentiated foot-traffic events like this will become a core marketing strategy for hypermarkets."
siuu@heraldcorp.com
