Nikhil Inamdar
Thousands of neighborhood stores, unable to compete with online applications, have closed, according to reports
The Ramji Dharod corner store has been inhabited for more than six decades is now on the verge of closure.
The store is on a ball in the compliment of the lively commercial city of the central Indian city of Mumbai and served the community for 75 years.
Dharod began to come to the store with his father when he was only 10 years old. These days, he is mainly sitting inactive, waiting for an occasional customer between.
Behind him, cardboard boxes of unsold cookie packets and snacks show a panel of “customs clearance” displayed on them.
“I would not get a minute to breathe a few years ago, but now I rarely do someone,” said the septuagenarian with irony. “They all make online shopping. I decided to retire and go down the shutters.”
While 10 -minute online deliveries by “fast trade” applications like Zomato, Blinkit and Zepto pervaded in Urban India, hundreds of thousands of neighborhood stores in cities have closed.
A group of consumer products distributors estimated that this number of 200,000 last October, while the municipal organization of the southern city of Chennai estimated that 20% of small grocers and 30% of the department stores of the departments had closed in the city in the last 5 years.
Nikhil Inamdar
Three out of 10 retailers declared a negative impact of fast trade on their business
Sunil Kenia who runs a provisions store right next to the Dharod store says he is still in business only because his family has the shop. Persons to rent can no longer stay afloat, he said.
“It started to descend after the cowardly locking. Business represents 50% of what we did before the pandemic,” Kenia told the BBC.
Most of its income now come from wholesale customers – Hawkers or those who sell street snacks. The retail customer has almost “disappeared”, he says, due to the convenience of mobile deliveries.
The graphic designer based in Mumbai, Monisha Sathe, is one of the millions of urban Indians who have stopped their weekly race on the market due to the ease of fast trade.
“Home grocery stores were great pain,” said Sathe. And from time to time, when she has taken out her car, sailing narrow market routes and finding a parking lot would be a challenge.
Sathe says that she is missing the human interaction she had with grocers and vegetable sellers and even the variety of fresh products on sale – but for her, balance always bows in favor of online deliveries because of the ease with which it gave her life.
A recent survey carried out by the PWC Council shows that 42% of urban consumers in the big cities of India think like Sathe, in particular the rapid preference for their urgent needs. And these changes in purchasing behavior led to three of the 10 retailers reporting a negative impact on their business, with a 52% drop in sales of essential products.
Nikhil Inamdar
Commercial organizations have made repeated pleadings to the government against the frightening expansion of online delivery applications
But to what extent did fast trade really dig the Indian street?
There is no doubt that the general trade – which includes grocery stores, corner stores and even major retail – has been threatened, explains Ankur Bisen, partner of Technopak Retail Advisory. But at least for the moment “fast trade is still a story of three four in the city,” he said. Almost all their sales come from these cities.
Rapid lightning deliveries have shaken the global trend and have succeeded in India largely due to a large concentration of people staying in urban clusters.
They are served in low -rent “dark stores” – or small stores dedicated to delivery and not open to the public – in densely populated areas, allowing economies of scale.
But the precarious nature of demand and fragmented demographic data from small cities could make you expensive for fast trade players to develop and earn money beyond metros, explains Mr. Bisen.
There is no doubt, however, that these online deliveries will disturb trade in the longer term.
Bain and Company expects fast trade to increase more than 40% per year until 2030, driven by expansion through “geographies”.
And that made traditional nervous retail.
Commercial organizations – such as the Confederation of all India merchants, or the Federation of Distributors of Consumer Products All India, which qualifies the voice of Indian retailers of $ 13 million – have made urgent and repeated pleads to the government against this cheeky expansion.
They allege that these companies use billions of dollars in venture capital funds to engage in anti-competitive practices such as “predatory pricing” or “a” deep reduction “which has further distorted the rules of the game for mom and pop stores.
The BBC spoke to several small retailers who shared these concerns. Mr. Bisen also agreed that there is evidence of such practices in the clusters that fast trade companies operate.
Getty images
Online deliveries of ten minutes by applications like Zomato, Blinkit and Zepto are a company of $ 7 billion in India
Swiggy, Zepto and Blinkit, who mainly control this market, have not agreed to comment on the BBC requests on these allegations.
But a source in one of the fast-sales business companies told the BBC that the reduction of traders on the platform and not by them.
The source also said that unlike the binary story of the “big guy against little guy”, online deliveries were resolving real challenges for people for whom to go to the market was a “traumatic” experience.
“Think of women or the elderly-they do not want to be harassed or navigate in the nests and traffic,” said the source. “Also consider the small brands that are sold on our platform – they never get a conservation space in physical stores where only the big names are displayed. We have democratized the market.”
Analysts say that the diversity of India in terms of development stages, income levels and infrastructure will mean that in the end, all retail models – small corner stores, large retailers and fast trade platforms – will coexist in the country.
It is not a “winner takes the whole market”, explains Mr. Bisen, giving the example of electronic commerce that came to India in 2010 and was to ring the death knell for local retailers.
Even after all these years, only 4% of all purchases are made online in India.
But the undulations caused by fast trade should be a warning for physical retailers, according to analysts, to improve their marketing and integrate technology to use online and offline channels to offer their consumers a better shopping experience.
Competition with the delivery of clicks on a button means that it can no longer be as usual for millions of corner stores that have existed for decades, with little or no innovation.
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