The Retail Primer

Imagine these nerve wrecking situations that we find ourselves in way too often - you are throwing a party over the weekend and inviting your close friends home and your wife wants to prove that she’s a better cook than your friends’... or your mother wants you to buy her some fresh vegetables for that special family dinner tonight… Your son is late for school and calls out from the bathroom for soap that you ran out of yesterday and forgot to replace…

You have landed that much coveted job and want to impress your new colleagues on your first day at work; you definitely want a fresh wardrobe to look up-to-date..! It’s only when you are getting ready for work and look yourself in the mirror, running your palm over your stubble that you realise that you squeezed the last ounce of shaving cream from its tube yesterday...

Individually, these are mundane situations. But they usually throw us out of gear and leave us in a dilemma, rendering us unable to choose the right destination for our shopping.


The dilemma is one of choice. A decade ago, the choice was simple. You always went to your friendly neighbourhood grocery to shop for all day-to-day requirements – be it rice, sugar, toothpaste or hair oil. And you patronised only the lone cloth merchant on the main street near your house or office to buy fabric to be stitched by your family tailor or you went to one of those run-down stores that called itself the ‘departmental’ store to pick-up readymade apparel. (It will require a great deal of convincing Indian retailers that there is nothing ‘departmental’ about their businesses - besides being semantically incorrect, you will only find ‘department store’ in the retail lexicon).

Back to our dilemma; do you run to the neighbourhood grocery or do you go to that new-fangled ‘supermarket’ down the street? Or is it better to make a weekend trip with family to either a mall or that big box called ‘Hypermarket’ – providing you have the energy and patience to drive that agonising 10 kms.

A bar of soap or a 100 gms tube of shaving cream are the same no matter where you buy them from – either your neighbourhood grocer or the supermarket. Where you choose to shop however, is determined by what you want (the purpose) and how soon you want it (the immediacy of your need). What the retail world likes to call ‘a planned purchase’ or ‘an emergency purchase’ or merely ‘an impulse purchase’. And if you are wondering; studying why people buy what they buy is indeed a science.

Of course, in the above examples, the soap is an emergency and so is the tube of shaving cream. But, the veggies for dinner or supplies for the party can surely wait. And you really do not want to rush through choosing your new wardrobe.

Retailing in India is undergoing a sea change. Even traditional ‘retailers’ have long discarded their philosophy of “Buy Low; Sell High and keep the difference” and are quickly imbibing the virtues of serving their customers. ‘One-man’ or ‘one-family’ enterprises that comprise most of the 12 million retail outlets in India are making way for large, corporate funded, professionally managed entities. We therefore see a whole gamut of neat, clean and air-conditioned stores that offer the ‘touch and feel’ factor in self-service formats.

Given the plethora of choices, there seems to be a need for un-cluttering our minds and de-mystifying the esoteric world of ‘Organised’ or ‘Modern’ Retail. The next time we are in a tight spot about choosing a shopping destination, we know what ‘format’ of store to choose that meets our unique needs and yet offers maximum benefit.