From
shopping grocery at Kirana stores to Government Ration Shops to one of the
first organized retail shops in India to the supermarkets and hypermarkets and
finally now with my own mobile Apps for Grocery, I would say I have been lucky
to see them all. My tryst with Grocery shopping is cut to the early 90s when I
would accompany my father to the state-run TUCS shops and PDS shops and bring,
rice, dal & kerosene kept on the back of our bicycles. During the late 90s,
a retail shop named Subiksha opened in the heart of South Chennai – a store
similar to a PDS but a bit modern with staff in uniform who assisted customers
with their shopping needs and a computerized bill to support the transaction. I
remember cycling 5 kms to buy 3 kgs of sugar, which would save us 10-12% than
buying from the neighborhood Kirana shop. I used to be amazed at how shopping
was revolutionized in the late 90s with the advent of “Shop n Stop” a modern
retail store close to my house in Royapettah that encouraged self-service,
which was not just a fancy thing but also a very convenient one.
I
was fortunate in the early 2000s to join and work with RPG Retail’s Foodworld
Supermarkets, which was one of the earliest organized retail stores in India.
From consumer offers to world class shopping experiences, the company paved the
way for future entrants with this format of retailing. When I joined the Future
Group, I witnessed how a humble 1,500 sft of a supermarket had morphed itself
into a hypermarket with Food Bazaar spread over 10,000 sft at its largest
outlet then in 2004 and that too on the fourth floor of India’s first seamless
Mall, Bangalore Central. Till date, our family has shopped only at Food Bazaar
in over 95% of cases. That’s some loyalty, rather just the convenience of
shopping the entire household I would say. Late 2000s was the challenging periods
for Retail, although not as worse as what we’ve been witnessing for the past 24
months. Hypermarkets reduced their sizes and have found the 4,000 sft model as
their sweetspots and are still tweaking their models.
Since
the turn of the decade in 2010, we have seen online retailers come and go and
behemoths like Big Basket stay on with a supposedly proven model. I would like
to cite the example of IBuyFresh.com which was the online effort of Kovai
Pazhamudir Nilayam, a Coimbatore based Retail store that started with fresh
Fruits & vegetables and later moved on to the Grocery & Household
segments. The e-commerce start-up, which was serving over 800 orders a day in
just 6 months of commencing shut down abruptly one day due to viability issues.
Others like Peppertap and Local Banya raised millions of dollars to eventually
shut down their ventures leaving smaller players like my own Hyperlocal start-up
Oyethere.com in jeopardy, what with Investors sitting on the fence not wanting
to experiment on new models any further.
