14th Nov 2009
Let me dive right into one of the things this blog is supposed to be about instead of explaining what this blog is supposed to be about.
I have been fascinated with the workings of the tons of retail shops that flood nearly every street of every town in India. May be the villages are a bit different where you have a centralized location for some market and consumer activity.
So why does every road we tread have a shop selling confectioneries candies, biscuits and ALMOST every road has a "general stores" by that I mean shops which sell soaps and other household objects.
The first part of the question can be easily dismissed as a euphemism. Instead of asking why does every street have a cigarette shop (yes middle class Indians and well to do Indians still view smoking as an evil not simply as a bad habit) but that’s for another day another analysis.
How do we account for the 2nd one?
Why do we have so many general stores?
How much do they really make with such competition?
And we seldom if not never see one of them offering anything different from the other. So how do such stores continue to live and sometimes thrive in the face of such competition?
With no difference in product quality or service quality? (most cases)
As I go about unraveling this I will introduce a lot of numbers and facts which are not readily or easily available in the Indian context. Well I hope to at least :)
Gopal Balakrishnan
Questions like why did the apple fall to the ground are too simple and these help unravel some of the solutions that are lurking around the corner. Sometimes questions make for interesting research with no real outcome. Ask me questions that you would like answered and I will do the necessary due diligence like a consulting company does. The idea is to think out of the box and come up with facts, numbers, research and insights into ‘why things are’, ‘how things can be’ and everything in between.
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