So, what constitutes our friendly
neighbourhood Retail ? In a typical neighborhood of about 100 families
or above what all retail stores/services we can find ? We can the
define the criteria for the “neighborhood” as - it should be in a
walkable distance - a 10 year old kid in the family or the eldest
grandma/grandpa in the family should be able to walk and buy the things.
Basic Necessities
A departmental
store/Kirana shop, a pharmacy store and a vegetable shop are the bare
necessities. Sometimes the vegetable shop forms part of the
departmental store itself but mostly available as a separate entity.
Though the above shops take tele-order and do home delivery, mostly the
customer walks-in and purchases the stuff.
Also included in the
basic necessity comes the milk vendor and the newspaper vendor. Both
these services are home delivered on a fixed-monthly-fee basis. For
most of the homes the daily morning chore starts with the above two - a
dose of the daily news and a hot cup of coffee.
Add-ons
Along with the above, a
bakery, a sweet and savories shop, a chicken/mutton/fish stall, an
exclusive fruit shop, a mini restaurant/hotel completes the
food/grocery requirements of the neighborhood. Typically these shops
may be little farther (within 1to 1.5 kms) and service two or three
neighborhood clusters. They may also prefer a fair bit of floating
population (adjacent to a bus stop, main road or a junction)
A mini kirana shop
(”petti” kadai or a Paan shop equivalent) which mostly stocks
cigarettes & related stuff and a tea/coffee shop (standalone or
part of the mini kirana shop) are also the necessities in the above
areas.
A fancy store and a
stationary store to meet the school going kids requirement are the
other two shops you can find. They sell the typical bangles, bindhi,
toys, greeting card, school maps, note books etc. Some of these shops
also sell mobile SIM cards or one can find a exclusive Mobile stores
which sells both the handsets and SIM card of all brands of SIM. (Even
10 years before it would have been hard to imagine a SIM card selling
store in your neighborhood !!)
Already I can count 16 different types of stores/services to be offered.
Services
A dhobi(Laundry)
service, barber shop, tailor shop, cycle service centre, two wheeler
repair/service centre, flour-mill are the typical services which you
can find in the vicinity of the neighborhood. While these services
mostly expects the customer to walk-in and get served, other service
providers like electrician, plumber, electronics services engineer are
available on call.
Other Stores
Having the reach for three or four neighborhood clusters, these
stores typically serve for a much larger audience. Some of these stores
are electrical spare parts, general hardware, electronics items,
automobile spare parts, paint shops, furniture store, sports shop,
photo studio/development centre, household articles like vessels etc.
In the food and grocery segment you can find a coffee powder vending
shop, rice vending shop and oil vending shop. In the upmarket areas a
florist is the recent addition one can see.
The major segments that
are missing in the above list are – textiles & garments, footwear,
luggage items and Jewellery. Though we can find stores of these type in
our neighbourhood, typically the patronage for these segments is
comparatively low. Guess most of the customers still prefer the large
format stores present in the commercial areas over that of the
neighborhood stores (at least for these segments).
On a further micro level
you can find transient stores which specialize in only one product and
usually sell at a particular time only – say a flower vendor who sells
only flowers near a temple only during evening, a tamarind merchant
hawking the tamarind on his cycle only during morning and so on.
We can also add a
plethora of utility services to the above list – Photocopy services,
Internet browsing centre, Courier services, Tours & Travel
services, Tuition centres, Creches, …..etc etc.
As we can see there are almost 50 different types of retail products and services (excluding
the govt/PSU based service like banks, Post offices ..) serving the
consumer. It will be impossible for a single or several big players to
dominate such a market. It will always be the story of both organized
and unorganized retail co-existing together and as usual the Customer
will be the king.
Sivakumar
