6 in 10 Koreans support allowing hypermarkets to offer dawn delivery

Six in 10 Koreans believe hypermarkets should be allowed to offer dawn delivery, a new survey shows.

According to a retail industry perception survey commissioned by the Korean Distribution Association and conducted by Winji Korea Consulting, 65 percent of respondents said hypermarkets should be permitted to provide dawn delivery.

The most commonly cited condition for allowing such services was an expansion of delivery coverage areas, at 43.5 percent. That was followed by applying the same occupational safety standards as online retailers, at 37.9 percent, and establishing support measures for small and midsize local retailers, at 18.4 percent.

The survey was conducted via mobile web from April 1 to April 5 among 2,000 adults aged 18 and older. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.19 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.

The survey also found that 75.8 percent of respondents said they sense a crisis in the domestic hypermarket industry. Some 66.6 percent viewed the ongoing wave of store closures as a problem that is shrinking local lifestyle infrastructure. Respondents also expressed concern that continued closures would worsen consumer access to grocery shopping (53.9 percent), local economies and commercial districts (47.7 percent), and regional employment (38.0 percent).

Nearly 70 percent — 69.8 percent — said they did not agree with the argument that hypermarket regulations are necessary to protect traditional markets and small retailers. On the mandatory closure system for hypermarkets, a combined 59.5 percent supported easing or abolishing the requirement — 30.8 percent favored relaxing it and 28.7 percent called for scrapping it altogether — while only 30.4 percent said the current system should be kept in place. However, when it came to restrictions on opening new hypermarket locations, more respondents supported maintaining or tightening the rules (46.5 percent) than easing or eliminating them (43.1 percent).

Jang Myeong-gyun, a professor at the Korean Distribution Association, said the public views hypermarkets not as negative economic actors subject to regulation, but as core retail infrastructure that contributes to consumer welfare and local economies. He added that regulations on hypermarkets, in place for more than a decade, need to be revisited, and that retail industry policy should shift away from regulation-centered approaches toward consumer-focused regulatory reform.