A banner announcing the suspension of operations hangs at the Homeplus Myeonmok branch in Jungnang-gu, Seoul. [Herald DB]
A banner announcing the suspension of operations hangs at the Homeplus Myeonmok branch in Jungnang-gu, Seoul. [Herald DB]

A new study has found that rising consumer spending at online retailers is directly eating into hypermarket sales. As online retail channels expand, regulations such as operating-hour restrictions and mandatory closure days are compounding the structural squeeze on brick-and-mortar hypermarkets, the study found.

Lee Gong, a researcher at the Korea Development Institute, said June 30 that a 1 percent increase in per-capita online spending is associated with a 0.264 percent decline in hypermarket sales. The finding came from an analysis of monthly Shinhan Card transaction data from January 2020 to December 2024, published in a KDI Focus report titled "The Growth of Online Retail and Policy Directions for the Retail Market."

Overall retail market sales grew 8.2 percent in 2024, but offline retail managed only a 2.0 percent gain. Online retail sales, by contrast, rose 15.0 percent. Online channels' share of total retail sales surpassed 50 percent in 2023 and expanded further to 60 percent as of March this year.

However, the growth of online retail did not uniformly drag down all offline formats. When per-capita online spending in a given area rose 1 percent, sales at corporate supermarkets rose 0.221 percent, convenience store sales climbed 0.324 percent, and other specialty retailers gained 0.356 percent. The findings suggest that consumers continued to patronize nearby offline stores even as they bought a wider range of products online.

Lee said Homeplus's crisis "is difficult to explain solely as the management failure of a single company," adding that it "suggests the operational crisis facing the hypermarket sector as a whole is likely to persist on a structural level." He said the current regulatory framework focuses on offline hypermarkets while online retail platforms — which in effect absorb the same consumer demand — face no comparable rules, and called for regulatory parity between online and offline channels.


korean@heraldcorp.com