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Way Out

 

Our car radio is typically tuned to UFM100.3 in the morning. While driving to work today, we heard one of the winning entries for their "Script It Right" Chinese Radio Drama Script Writing Competition ("与声剧来"中文广播剧创作比赛). The title of the script is “出路“ (literally translated as “Way Out”) and revolved around a conversation between an elderly couple manning a chicken rice stall. The husband was adamant about sticking to the old ways of doing business and had refused to adopt new modes like delivery platform or cashless payment. This was despite a drastic drop in his business compared to his competitor who had evolved with time. He was insistent that, with an established brand name and good quality product, customers will continue to patronize without him having to resort to what he termed as “frills” to support his business. 


The story reminded us of our own business evolution journey. It was not so long ago when we only had 3 main modes of payment at the shop, i.e. cash, NETS and credit card. When cashless payment platforms such as Grabpay/Apple Pay/PayNow started coming onto the scene, we were (like the chicken rice seller) initially quite hesitant to adopt such new modes of payment. There were myriad of concerns, chief among them the need to change/adapt our internal process to integrate into the new payment modes. But we soon discovered that more and more customers want to go cashless/card-less. Many would just come to the shop with just their phones and no wallets. So either we move with the times or get left behind. And once we start to overcome that “stuck in the old ways” mentality, we realized that it is actually not that tedious/difficult to “evolve”.




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