A neighbourhood store is in a marriage with the customer. It needs to feel friendly and predictable, a place where she can go in a jiffy and load up her shopping trolley without much thought ( Photo: Ajay Verma / Reuters )

Kavita and Sanjeev met each other at a blind date. Kavita, since she didn’t know the other person and really wanted to have a long-term relationship, pulled out all stops to attract him. She wore her hottest dress, did her makeup perfectly, put on high heels. Ditto for Sanjeev. They both looked their best. However, it didn’t work out, and they both moved on. And repeated the manouvre.

Every time she went to meet a man, Kavita dressed to kill. And the men, too, were out to impress her. She kept ‘trying out’ new partners, until she met the right man: Solid, dependable, and one who knew her tastes and preferences. Ravi, she knew, was the one with whom she was going to spend the rest of her life. That’s when she became comfortable. The high heels were discarded in favour of comfortable flats; easy-to-wear jeans and tops replaced sexy dresses; and it was a relief not having to put on makeup every time she met Ravi. Kavita now sought steadiness of temper, not flash, and in Ravi she got that.

How she wished her neighbourhood supermarket would also follow Ravi’s example. When supermarkets started out in India, it was all very exciting! There were offers, deals, product samples and festivals all the time! Six years ago, Kavita first visited one such place; she put on her ‘going out’ clothes, as if she was attending a party and not making a trip to a grocery store.

The place did, after all, provide a party-like atmosphere with all the hoopla around it. The children, too, loved the carnival-like setup, with balloon-sellers and toy rides providing added excitement. It was fun to look for new offers during every visit and gawk at the cosmetics on display.

But after a while, as Kavita became a regular visitor, she gave up dressing well for it. There was no real need to frequent a grocery store in an Anita Dongre outfit. Her casual outfit would do just as well. In fact, when she looked closely, there were many women there who seemed to have simply picked up their purse and come there, without bothering to change into anything more formal than what they wore at home.

Visiting the grocery store had become a habit; the novelty factor had withered away just like in Ravi. There were women in bathroom slippers, in nightgowns with a dupatta thrown in, or simply in casuals. Clearly, they were there for the serious business of picking up groceries for the household and not for entertainment.

The store, on the other hand, hadn’t yet caught up with the fact that their dates with customers had matured into a marriage. Customers who treated the store as a ‘marriage partner’ wanted a different set of attributes. They wanted stability and predictability from it, not a casual flirtation with flashy displays and loud offers. They were regulars there not because the shop windows were beautiful or there were store-wide danglers promoting products, but because they knew they would get their milk and bread at the same price every day.

However, the store continued to treat its regulars as casual dates: There today and gone tomorrow. They’d come, indulge, make instinctive purchases and move on. Each day, the store adorned itself in the anticipation of a new batch of customers, and seemed to forget the regulars. And these regular customers wouldn’t be satisfied with a six-pair-socks combo on a given day; instead, they needed to know if they could buy their entire month’s stock of sugar in one large pack.

A neighbourhood store is in a marriage with the customer. It needs to feel friendly and predictable, a place where she can go in a jiffy and load up her shopping trolley without much thought. It has to be committed to the relationship, to understand what the customer needs on a regular basis and give her all that unfailingly.

In terms of store-behaviour, this means simple pricing, some unchanged facets, a stable arrangement of products, good quality of food grains, less noise every month and most importantly, a consistent availability of all items she needs.

A store in a mall has to have good aesthetics; it has to show its best during its brief interaction with the customer. If it is late for the date, it can smile, say sorry and give a rose to the customer. There’s no problem if it runs out of orange juice as long as it gives a ‘buy one get one free’ on the muesli.

The neighbourhood store, on the other hand, is heading for divorce if it forgets to pick up the child from school, and buys the wife a nice dress to tender an apology. She is never going to forgive him, just as she isn’t going to forgive the store for not stocking sabudana on the eve of Janmashtami. A 20-rupees discount on detergent is no compensation for the oversight whatsoever. Making the sabudana available would imply that the store understands her and lives up to her need for predictability and consistency. This is an instinct that is most important in a relationship.

There’s a place for both neighbourhood and destination stores [the ones within malls] in the market. The former offers a habit-formation proposition while the latter provides a ‘filler’ space to the casual customer. The store should understand what need it fulfills in the customer’s life, and behave accordingly. A mismatch here, and the ‘marriage’ is bound to collapse there!

And do note that most women, even in their shoppers role, are not keen on endless flirting and dating!

These swanky modern, corporate stores are changing not just us, the served, but also the lives of those who serve us there (Photo by Getty Images)

Raghavan, a department manager in an upmarket store in Mumbai, was a bit intrigued when an elderly lady walked up to him one day and said “You have changed our entire family for the better. Please do visit us at home.” The woman was, Raghavan discovered, one of his customer associates, Sulekha’s mother. Sulekha works in the men’s casual section of the store.

A few days later, as promised, Raghavan went for a courtesy visit to Sulekha’s place, located 2 km from the store, in a modest chawl. She lived there with her parents and two brothers. “Her father works in a small factory in MIDC. Her bhau (elder brother) drives an auto,” said the mother as Raghavan sipped tea. “And this brat Suresh here, is the youngest, in 6^th standard”. After keenly listening to Sulekha’s mother for half an hour, the full depth of her “changes our entire family” statement unfolded in Raghavan’s mind.

The interactions and atmosphere in Sulekha’s family were earlier defined by the influences the father and the elder brother brought from their work contexts – a small factory floor and the streets of the city, respectively. And everyone in the neighbourhood inhabited a similar world. The language there is rough and tough, expletives are commonplace and everyone tends to get aggressive at the slightest pretext. Alcohol consumption is fairly regular and women face aggression at home, often.

Raghavan recalled how when Sulekha joined, like the rest of her peer group, she went through a ‘GuruCool’ induction week where the main emphasis was on inculcating self belief, confidence, gender equality and soft skills. Now he knew why so many trainees found ‘GuruCool’ life changing. Confidence in self, respect for others, listening, firm but polite talk were indeed things that were very different from the family context they had hitherto experienced.

On the modern retail floor, 60% of employees are women and no-one dare treat them with disrespect. “Even customers, when they come to malls, seem to behave better,” girls often said, in team meetings.

“Sir that smart uniform of yours is like an armour for my Sulekha,” her mother said. “She can talk to anyone, in any high position, when she has the uniform on!”

Though modern retail employees on the floor are often only high school graduates, they are given intense technical training about the products in their section. For instance the young male associate in the international branded shoes section, though speaking in Hindi, knows more and talks more confidently about running shoes than any customer of his. And that does a world of good to his self-esteem. It is a pleasure to see young women confidently explaining the features of different types of jeans, and which kind suits the customer best. And through all interactions, these young men and women who otherwise live a world of harshness, remain polite and helpful, firm yet friendly.

Before modern stores came into being, what employment options did young boys and girls with modest education have near their homes? Tiny, traditional retail stores were crammed places with low pay, no training, no rights and sweat shop work conditions. Small factories would offer seasonal packing or cleaning jobs to girls like Sulekha. Modern stores, branded restaurants, chain hotels, are opening up new job opportunities that require hard work but offer a host of “organised sector” benefits to local youngsters. And gradually the social acceptance of these new jobs is changing. One of the early department store leaders, B.S. Nagesh of Shoppers’ Stop, once said, “It was 7 long years before our customer care associates were fine going out in store uniforms after work!” Today, Sulekha’s mom calls the same uniform, her “confidence armour”!

The real change did not stop at how Sulekha’s world view, confidence and behaviour had changed. It permeated down to the rest of her family, to what Sulekha inculcated in her kid brother, to how she laid down the law on her ‘bhau’s’ treatment of his wife.

“Having a confident youngster – that too a woman with her own world view shapes the entire family. She can make us all happier and hopeful about our future. Thank you for taking our Sulekha and giving us such a nice young woman, Sir,” signed off her mother with moist eyes.

This is not a romantic view of modern retail. These swanky modern, corporate stores are changing not just us, the served, but also the lives of those who serve us there. Here, Neha Srivastava from Lucknow or Jyoti Lodhi from Bhopal have similar life shaping stories.

Call centres jobs were no software jobs. But they changed many young lives. Retail jobs are local jobs, need basic qualifications but touch a large number of youngsters and their families, as catalysts of hope and change. Even if these jobs are used by folks as an interim stepping stone in their onward journey of life, these new ‘steps’ help them stand tall and learn to look at their future in the eye. Try sensing the human story behind the uniformed person when you meet her in the store next time.

Image Courtesy: Indiapicture

Though Chitra looked forward to festival time, with its markers of new clothes, firecrackers, visitors and food, as a working woman, she was also stressed by the idea of making the special festival food for her family of four. Her regular office job left her no time to spare for making the laddoos, karanjis, chakli, puran polis, chivda and so on that custom demanded she make, and that her family looked forward to so much. To make all the delicacies, Chitra had to necessarily take time off from work, something she was loath to do.

Her quest began a few weekends before the actual festival as she set out to scour the markets for all the ingredients she required to make the goodies. Lack of practice brought its own set of problems as Chitra laboured through all the recipes, the annual rendering making them inaccurate and difficult to execute. Also, with the new awakening about fitness, there was an imperative to consume less of the fried, sweet snacks. But that’s never an option when cooking at home.

One inevitably ends up making large quantities that eventually struggle to not end up in the garbage can. Add to this the dilemma of handling the left over ingredients, special foods like kopra (dried coconut) which are otherwise seldom used in the kitchen, but which aren’t available in the modest quantity that Chitra actually needed, and the list of wasted food became quite long. It was also a task from which there was no escape until very recently. Traditional sweet shops do not carry specialty delicacies. Most professional vendors require bulk orders and cater only to parties. So these two sources of ready-to-eat snacks were ruled out. Then, two years ago, she discovered Narmadaben.

A fifty something woman, Narmadaben lives in a chawl five minutes away from Chitra’s apartment complex. She lost her husband a few years ago, and in order to make ends meet, hit upon the idea of using her cooking skills to her monetary advantage. She had met a few women like Chitra who exhorted her to help them out in the kitchen, and at their request started preparing food for the various festivals through the year.

Narmadaben was happy with the idea. Whether it is Diwali or Holi, Navratri or Janmashtami, there is always something special that is cooked. Having done this all her life, the older woman had no difficulty in switching to a more commercial mode of production while retaining the traditional taste and flavor. Her ‘customers’ were happy. For a price almost equal to what they would have paid had they bought all the ingredients separately, they were getting food that would have taken them hours to cook with the added bonus of being true to the original taste. For Narmadaben, it was not so much a job as a labour of love. She got to do what she was good at and got paid for it.

Chitra enjoyed interacting with Narmadaben. On the eve of Diwali, she went across to ‘Narmada Auntie’s’ house where two more women were working in the spotlessly clean kitchen under the head chef’s able guidance. Her host-cum-supplier offered her a cup of tea, and with it some namkeen. The latter proved delicious, and without hesitation, Chitra had her pack half a kilo of this along with the rest of the items. Narmadaben, a chatty person, told Chitra many details about the upcoming festival that the latter had been unaware of, having lived in a nuclear family for more than a dozen years now. Chitra could not help but say, “Thank you, Auntie” as she left with her parcels.

As urban women in India enter the workforce in larger numbers, and migrate to nuclear families, away from the guidance of mothers and grandmothers, their affinity to their culture is also slowly dissipating. The number of women who retain a significant connect with their heritage and traditions is gradually declining. Urban kitchens are also changing, with women seeking convenience and tastes that are more suited to modern lifestyles and palates. They seek conventionality too, but in a form that is more synchronized with modernity. Less and less women want these traditions residing in their kitchens, everyday. Instead they prefer the occasional visit!

Into this void has walked in a network of ‘aunties’, women who continue to be connected to their roots in simple, homely ways, can prepare ‘grandma’s own recipe’ for a variety of cooked food, and are willing to exploit this knowhow to earn a living. And not just at festival time. Most regular household snacks come from the ‘auntie’ network. The more organized women are regular suppliers to the friendly neighborhood stores, while the smaller enterprises supply out of their residences. Indeed full hot meals can be obtained from the ‘poli-bhaji’ (chapatti-curry) kendras, small outlets selling cooked food, that are peppered all over the suburbs in Mumbai, and that are popping up with increased frequency across the country.

As women in the West became busy and prosperous, they adopted ready to eat, ready to cook meal solutions, branded and made in large food factories. They had no recourse to an ‘auntie’ network for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, and large scale industrialization had quickly penetrated the food industry. ‘West’ thinking multinational and Indian companies have tried to transfer the same technology to India with poor success. Ready to cook or ‘heat and eat’ solutions are at the farthest fringe of the family meal at home. This is mainly because the Indian family resists standardization of its tastes and preferences, and moving from its staple meals and homely food to culture-neutral manufactured food is tough. Even in cities, people are still close enough to their roots to know what their traditional food tastes like.

Finally, this is outsourcing country, after all. When the queen of the kitchen becomes busy in the workplace, she outsources her kitchen not to the gigantic food factories, but to other women and their kitchen, that is, the ‘auntie’ network. It is a solution that has proved a win-win for both parties.

In this solution, the urban woman is assured of getting familiar and homely food that is fresh and contains no preservatives while being reasonably priced. At the same time, hygiene and purity of ingredients is assured since the food is being cooked in someone’s kitchen by someone very much like the woman’s own mother or grandmother. For the ‘aunties’ there is very little barrier to entering this sector. Even the poorest woman in India is trained to cook and bring up children. With their skills in providing processed food solutions that are hygienic, fresh and customized to suit individual customer taste, these Narmadabens can pose a formidable challenge to the organised, factory-based ready-to-eat segment.

Eventually, many of these women will learn to modernize, brand their products and learn to sell them through the upcoming modern chain retailers. When this happens, when availability and close-to-heart solutions come together, processed food will actually enter the urban Indian kitchen in earnest, conclusively leaving behind the made-in-factory solutions. That’s the day the Chitras of this world will truly say ‘Thank you, Auntie’.

Costco is a jumbo place that sells everything in big packs. Yet, it’s very simple and basic. There is no music and the flooring is grey. Image Courtesy: Molly Riley/Reuters

James Sinegal started off his life in an orphanage and grew up in a small apartment in a small suburb of California called Riverside. He started his working life as a bagger helper at FedMart and went on to set up Costco – one of the path-breaking and most successful big box warehouse club stores of the world. The first few decades of Wal-Mart’s journey were marked by its identification with the simple, accessible, earthy Sam Walton.

These stories are now folklore and are known to many customers of Costco or Wal-Mart, in some form or the other. Small stories behind big box retail stores seem to matter. They are fountain-springs of how these stores are imagined, designed and then perceived and consumed by their customers.

At a deeper level, the customer’s experience of “small” and “large” retail is not always about the scale of the store. It is possible to have a store that is physically large, yet psychologically small.

Costco is a jumbo place that sells everything in big packs. Yet, it’s very simple and basic. There is no music and the flooring is grey. Conversations can be heard; the staff wear normal clothes, not uniforms and yes, its founder was a ‘normal’ guy like us! Costco, like its founder’s story, is psychologically small and approachable. Both Costco and its customers seem to tell each other, “We just want a deal and want to live well”. Physically, the store, its aisles, trolleys, packages, are all huge. Psychologically, they are small. That seems to work, somehow.

Kishore Biyani designed Big Bazaar very differently from normal hypermarket stores. He said, “First generation of modern trade shoppers in India would get intimidated by a single, large store floor.” He visually broke the floor into a collection of logical, smaller, bazaars. Unlike single floor hypermarkets, he opened many multi-level Big Bazaars. He also threw in a lot of colours, street sounds and megaphone-wielding sellers. “In the mind, the store must always feel human scale,” said Biyani. Big Bazaar is by far the most accessible store of choice for Indian consumers, as they transition from traditional to modern shopping habits.

There is a distinct interplay of two things that seem to make modern stores click. The physical factors are all around you: scale, orderly shelves, direction signs, efficiency, technology. The vital psychological factor is also all around you, though in a subtler way. The colour, visual stimuli, approachability, folksiness of the staff, and even the story of the store’s founders… they all form a part of the psychological store we experience. It’s the interplay between these two brotherly factors that shapes the final consumer connect.

Jalan’s [Jalan's Retail] are the biggest retailers in the Varanasi area. On the terrace of their megastore, they run a clean eatery that serves hot, fresh food at subsidised rates. It is open to everyone. This simple feature surrounds the store with warm community goodwill. Auto-rickshaws  for instance, never refuse to take you to Jalan’s. Goods are delivered on time to this retailer. People feel the shop owners are good folks. With the experience of many years, the store owners know that it also helps their business. They need to do much lesser (regular) marketing!

Good wholesome shopping requires our customers’ guard to be down. In any imposing environment, our guard is intuitively up. We make sure we are on our best behaviour. Without exception, when we feel this way, our trolleys stop showing ‘enthusiasm’. I guess when the customer is not fussy about how the store looks or about her own appearance, and all her attention is on the merchandise on shelves and the stuff in her trolley, you know you are close to a retailers’ utopia!

Try thinking about the ‘psychological’ size of the store, next time you are in the market. Size matters!

(With inputs from Katie Mayers, California)

South Indian Fast-Food Heavenly dosa by Washington Park

“Sir, will your idli be plain, Kanchipuram, or Guntur?” a smartly-dressed woman at the counter near one of the departure gates of Hyderabad Airport asks me. I glance through the witty one-line descriptions of each variety of idli and go for the Kanchipuram idlis which come with their own set of flavours (cumin, ginger and pepper).

“One kanchipuram…,” she whispers into a microphone next to the counter. Turning to me, she adds, “Today, we have sambar in vengaya Tamil style or tomato Kanara style. Which one would you prefer? And shall I make a combo with filter coffee, buttermilk or Coke?”

I blurt out my choices from the digital screens which display the menu. I notice that they have special takeaway options for idli sambar. After paying Rs 90 for my idli-Coke combo, I move two steps ahead to the delivery desk. I see a tray (with tissues, Coke and a straw) awaiting me. Within 30 seconds, a plate of steaming fresh Kanchipuram idli and a bowl of vengaya (small onion) Tamil sambar rests on my tray. I add two types of chutneys from the ‘chutney bar’. It has many varieties from coconut, tomato and tamarind chutneys to esoteric ‘podis’.

As I enjoy my fresh, aromatic, tasty idli meal, I notice similar-sized stalls of a Pizza brand, a burger joint and of course, the place I described above – the Idli Factory.

In their construction and layout, all three stalls are nearly identical: An order booking counter with a touchscreen kiosk manned by uniformed youngsters, a visible kitchen area, a capped-and-gloved staff, disposable containers, tissues, bright food pictures, menus, day’s specials and more.

I realise that our humble idli stands alongside the burger patty and the pizza base, around which a whole world of food choices and modern delivery methods have come up which make casual dining a happy activity for families across the globe.

Global brands like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut have taken the casual, functional eating occasions to a level of excellence. At a cross-cultural platform, they bring in standardisation of products and service, hygiene, transparency of process, branding and a very contemporary ambience.

They also establish in our minds a new price point for casual dining: Rs 50 for a simple burger and Rs 100 for a snack meal. We get used to new price points and with all the modernity and good service, we don’t give much thought to the value we get.

It is important to realise that no vada-pav or idli eatery, starting from Udipi prices, can hope to scale the Rs 40 price point. Those price points (and customers who have no problems in paying that price), are a result of global players in this space.

At a 100-rupee price point for an idli and coffee, any Udipi diner worth its salt knows that it can create a completely exciting world of taste, ambience, choice and service. Courtesy McDonald’s and its global peers, customers are more than willing to pay Rs 100 for an idli meal too!

That’s when our Udipis and Darshanis can morph into Idli Factorys or Banana Leaf Cafes. They know their splendid recipes and fresh food formulae for generations together. The pots and plates and backroom methods change a bit and we have idli-dosa joints, chat-and-bhel counters and ice gola stalls in malls and elsewhere, which can attain global standards with ease.

At a highway halt at Muzaffarnagar near Delhi, McDonald’s and Haldiram’s are located within a common facility. They share a common parking lot, security area, restrooms and housekeeping services. Both have a very modern decor. Their prices too are similar.

Their menus are completely different, though. Haldiram’s even has a special Vrat (fasting) menu during the fasting week of Navratri in North India. This is a popular highway stop for people driving in and out of Delhi. The parking lot is full; this place is busy! At the same hour of the day, the number of people eating at the Haldiram’s side of the facility is double that at McDonald’s.

The shape of the Indian casual dining opportunity is now crystal clear. Thank you, McDonald’s!

Punit Paranjpe / Reuters

Sanjay and Rohan live with their families in a modern residential complex in upmarket Versova in western Mumbai. They often visit the new mall close by to watch a movie, eat in the food court, and of course, shop.

Sanjay likes to check out the latest trends and colours of the season in apparel while choosing his formals and casual ‘Friday’ dressing. The large department store in the mall meets his needs since it keeps an ‘in-season’ range most of the time. It is a well-stocked store, and keeps almost all brands in men’s clothing. There are store assistants in most of the aisles and the changing rooms are cool, pleasant places. Almost all the time, Sanjay is able to refurbish his wardrobe in this store. He is familiar with the merchandise and knows that the brands there follow international trends. The sizes are uniform and the pastel pinstripes and checks conform to his idea of both sobriety and trendiness.

Rohan, on the other hand, can’t find anything to his liking in the hundreds of shelves. He finds the almost uniform colours and patterns indistinct and boring. He wants something that stands out, preferably in solid colours with a little ‘twist’ in the design that makes the garment unique. The classy fit and international flavour that most brands advertise is lost on his sensibilities. Everything looks the same to him, and his wardrobe contains almost nothing from the store.

Why does this happen? What is the difference between the two men? They live in the same building, have similar disposable incomes; their children go to the same school and their age difference is negligible.

The only difference between the two men is their profession. Sanjay is a senior manager at a private bank while Rohan is a successful businessman who runs an injection-moulding factory in Vapi. The different professions of the two men lead to vastly different sensibilities and tastes. And nowhere is this more apparent than in their choice of attire.

Clothes speak a lot about the man. We normally think of clothes in the context of women but that’s a fallacy. The spate of designers who are now designing exclusively for men is testimony to the rising trend of men wanting more out of their attire than just an elegant covering.

Clothes can also give an indication of a man’s profession. The American TV show, Suits, is, as the title indicates, all about lawyers. A ‘suit’ is a derogatory term for someone working for the government and is no longer just an item of clothing. The kind of suit one wears is indicative of the kind of profession one is in.

Fashion, tastes and preferences are means by which we make a statement about ourselves. The white-collared Sanjay and the businessman Rohan have similar income levels, but what they seek to say about themselves is very different. A peep into their occupations and the dynamics therein could help us understand this phenomenon better.

When Sanjay joined the bank, he entered a well-defined hierarchy that he aspired to climb. He compared designations of his classmates to see where he stood on the corporate ladder. His desire was to belong, to follow the prevailing norms. Every Sanjay in the white-collared world of banks, multinationals and large corporate organisations wants to make a statement – that he deserves to be there. In dressing and fashion, this is a ‘club’ where the executive wants to ‘belong’.

Extend this scenario across the entire white-collared world and you get a class of educated people who follow the same trends – pinstripes, blues and greys, buttoned down collars, soft colours. It’s almost like a uniform; boys in a premier school. A manager is one who, while leading, also wishes to conform. There is a strong need not to ‘stand out’ lest one be thought of as a maverick. Also, the banker’s calling card says everything about him. He doesn’t need his shirt to do so.

Rohan inhabits a very different world where he is the boss. Everyone looks up to him. He has no corporate umbrella protecting him from the vagaries of the Indian system. He needs to exude power, confidence and unquestioned authority. He doesn’t have a large corporate name or a fancy designation on his visiting card and so he needs his own statement of power.

This he derives from his clothes, accessories, phones, pens, cars and so on – instruments he uses to signal his distinctive taste, influence and power. He needs to look distinguished and expensive, and his individuality has to come through. After all clothes maketh the man.

He cannot afford to drown his personality in shirts that can be found in every department store. Ideally his shirts have to be custom-made, but in a world of dwindling services he needs to find outlets for ready-mades where he is convinced that no two shirts look the same. He knows that department stores with their emphasis on subtlety and uniformity cannot offer him this customisation.

The modern department store has still not recognised this fundamental difference between the self-employed and the white-collared. Many marketers make the crucial mistake of treating both as SEC A customers. Most corporate fashion houses are inspired by Western fashions and ‘think’ seasons, cuts, designs accordingly. This might have to do with the fact that their leaders, designers, buyers, marketers are all from the white-collared world and hardly mingle with self-employed people professionally or socially.

At the other end of the spectrum are fashion designers who tend to ignore the world of professionals while creating their ‘look’. As a result the two worlds hardly meet sartorially.

Twenty years ago, this wasn’t the case. Good shirts were either bought on trips to the West or were stitched by experienced tailors. With liberalisation, the business manager was relieved to discover that the kind of shirts he prefers could now be found in his own city.

On the other hand, the self-employed wanted a distinctive look, embellishments and Indian motifs. They believed in their own design preferences and refused to follow the style diktat of mass designers. Fortunately for them, there are still some fashion brands that understand this need well.

Retailers like Benzer and Chirag Din and brands like Color Plus are known for catering to the tastes of the self-employed successfully. They offer individuality and slight flamboyance that almost every self-employed person sports. But are these brands large enough to cater to the entire population of entrepreneurs in this country? And can other brands afford to neglect this target segment?

A recent estimate indicates that in urban India, for every white-collared worker, there are five people with gold-collared – self employed, tastes and preferences. And like the professionals, this category also has huge spending power. Missing them would therefore mean ignoring a huge slice of the market, and thereby a huge opportunity.

If brands truly wish to extend their reach, they’ll have to cater to the gold-collared, as we call them, consumers as well. If they are able to straddle the twin requirements of conformity and flamboyance, they’ll have truly made a significant difference to the way apparel is marketed in this country.

One wonders if the large difference in fashion preferences also extends to other spheres? What about entertainment, food, fashion for other family members, credit cards? If apparel is so sensitive to a professional outlook, aren’t other things as well? Can the same marketing strategy be applied to all customers, irrespective of the occupation segment?

Do look around to spot the differences, next time you come across them.

Shivaram V. / Reuters

Beginning September 19, this year, many roads and public spaces in the city of Mumbai will change hands. They always do, every year. They will move from car owners to car drivers, from apartment residents to apartment cleaners, from pavement walkers to pavement dwellers. Those who travel in cars and dominate the city roads all year round, unmindful of the many more who don’t, will cede their dominance for the ten days of the Ganesh Festival to the unprivileged classes. For those ten days, the boisterous pandals and processions will push the carwallahs firmly down in the city’s priority. The festival marquees are constructed on public spaces, the attendant decorations are placed on the self-same roads, and processions to felicitate the arrival and departure of the deity meander down busy thoroughfares while car-owners look on helplessly, and have their quiet precincts invaded by decibel levels that could easily be declared illegal in another land. And we all know, this isn’t restricted to Ganpati. In different localities, on different days, this same power switch happens during the Mount Mary Fair, the holy month of Ramzan or the Govinda festival day in Mumbai. All parts of the country witness the phenomenon in some form during Durga Puja, Onam, Dussera, Ambedkar Jayanti, Holi and the hundreds of festivals that India celebrates every year.

Till a couple of decades back, most of these public festivals were led and shaped by the middle class ‘bhadralok’.  In the bad old socialist era, when everyone was poor, and the poor were desperately poor, only a few could claim access to public spaces. Marketing companies had no time for the really poor, who had no purchasing power. Festivals, therefore, had none of today’s larger than life pomp and circumstance, which is fuelled by gigantic promotion budgets by marketing companies. As prosperity grew, and the poor started becoming part of the consuming classes, they, too, entered the arena of public festivals, and gradually edged out the smaller middle class.

Public festivals have now been conclusively claimed by the less privileged class – the India Two. India Two is economically weaker than its counterpart in India One, the car people. However, the power of India Two lies in the collective. Their numbers are overwhelming, and they use this as a strength to overcome their economic weakness. Moreover, they are time-rich, tenacity-rich and never short on day-to-day enterprise. Though they reside in tenements and slums, they are also participants in the urban growth phenomena. Their incomes are growing and there is a corresponding increase in awareness and aspirations. The new sense of awareness and the power of the collective best manifests itself during the festivals of the community and the grand festival of democracy – the elections. On both these occasions, the collective India Two looks the cities and their privileged classes in the eye, and the haves assume a secondary role, even if temporarily.

Across the world and increasingly in India, for the new aspiring classes, the modern temples where growing prosperity is celebrated, are the large stores and malls. All those with purchasing power find their shopping nirvana in these new temples. These places are normally dominated by classes with higher spending power. But on certain days that dominance disappears. In the United States, for instance, the regular shoppers – the haves – are crowded out in the malls and the stores on the Thanksgiving weekend in November particularly, and to some extent on the national holiday on 4^th July, or during the Labour Day weekend. During these days all retail stores across the US run a deep discount sale. It is on these days that the less well-off people – immigrants, students, frugal Asians and Latinos – win hands down in the race for the best priced goods, defeating the regular shoppers. And their competition gear? The same as India Two – time, tenacity and enterprise. Families work together, they scour the ads for the best deals, youngsters queue up at the store gate overnight, buying in the store is done collectively. Hunting and gathering tasks are divided up by sections of the store. They grab the best goods before the stocks run out. They win, with the power of the collective. Stores win, too. It is a fact that many stores sell more on Black Friday than the rest of the year put together.

Back home in India too, such consumption festivals are taking shape on public holidays like the Republic Day and the Independence Day. There are stores like Big Bazaar and some home-grown retailers that arouse a response from their customers similar to the public festivals. You need a good three to four hours of time investment and tenacity to weave through the swelling crowds for any meaningful win at these consumption festivals. The time and effort needed serve as an effective entry barrier for the usual shoppers of these stores. The India Two, equipped with the life skills required from the very manner in which they go through their normal day, walk away with the largest share of the super deals on offer. They are used to doing things the hard way, they have no qualms about pushing their way through, and they are accustomed to the absence of any infrastructure to make life easy for them. For a change, they are offered an environment where these are the very skills that are needed for success. Naturally, at any large sale, where deep discounts are on offer, it is India Two that will make a killing. They will edge out the haves, those who enjoy the huge infrastructure of the stores for the rest of the year.

Those who understand and tap into this collective mindset will have queues in front of their stores on certain days of the year, queues that might even outweigh the sales in the rest of the year for the competition.

Disclosure: Damodar Mall is Director, Food Strategy at Future Group which owns the Big Bazaar chain of stores mentioned in this blog. 

If Britain is the nation of shopkeepers, India is the nation of male shopkeepers. From groceries to lingerie, everything in India is sold – by men. Friendly, knowledgeable, patronising or kindly, but men!

Women can be construction or agricultural labourers, managers and receptionists, even priests, but the sight of a woman behind a cash counter is an anomaly that can lead to raised eyebrows. A woman in a shop who isn’t the buyer is a curiosity. Barring some categories like fish and flowers sold on the streets, women never traded or “sold” things to strangers. They sold their services, their skills, managed money or budgets at home, but never got round to selling a cake of soap.

There’s a good reason why. Shopkeeping always involved things only men could do. For example, apart from the customers, the entire shopkeeping ecosystem is male dominated. All wholesalers are men. In a small grocery store, the store has to deal with over 30 suppliers/sales and delivery persons every day – all of whom are rough and tough men. The shopkeeper has to negotiate with them, bond with them, talk the hard talk of cash, cheque, with or without bill and be on back slapping terms with them, to run his shop well. Small shops in India are also sweatshops that employ uneducated workers, children, and remain open for long hours, an atmosphere unsuited for women.

Like many other parts of the Indian urban reality I see some compelling shifts in the way micro retailing is done here. We will witness increasing numbers of women shopkeepers in our neighbourhoods, within the next 3-5 years. Women’s education, empowerment, exposure are the obvious backdrop for this change, but there are a couple of retail specific changes that are loading the dice in favour of women becoming shopkeepers.

A major change is happening within the store. As small stores increasingly adopt the self-service format, the physical labour of serving the customer gets outsourced to the customer herself. The task of fetching every single item from the racks to the customer simply vanishes with self service retail. This is crucial, especially during peak sales times when multiple customers can simply ‘help themselves’ without burdening the shop attendants. Bar-coding, scanning, computerised billing methods make billing and money handling simpler, faster and more accurate. From being a stressed sweatshop with harried shop attendants, the shop turns into a quieter, more organised and less stressful place for the shopkeeper and his/her team.

But the real big change in shopkeeping is shaping at the sourcing backend. In many pockets of the country, a new type of single point, organised and corporate wholesalers is springing up rapidly. These are the cash and carry stores like Metro, Walmart Best Price, Carrefour, etc. Buying activity for a small shopkeeper now transforms from handling 30 negotiations a day, with men, to a simple trip to a cash-n carry wholesaler, who offers transparent prices and business terms for everything a small retail store needs. Also they often deliver to the store – one single point supplier, one creditor, one payment every 2 days! As more and more shopkeepers turn to this method of procurement, the barrier to women dealers is going to collapse. These modern wholesalers are gender-neutral, and at times even biased towards women since a big share of sales staff in these places are themselves women.

So, with the front end of the retail business changing to self service format and backend sourcing changing to the new corporatised distribution and wholesaling model for small retailers, the stage is set for a significant takeover of shopkeeping by women.

Come to think of it, women shopkeepers will be formidable competitors for men. Most customers are women and there will be greater natural empathy at play, if shops are run by women. The locally famous “Ladkiyon waali dukaan” (store of the daughters) in Galla Mandi near Gorakhpur routinely asks its women customers if they are looking for saunf for making pickles or for chewing after meals. It’ll take a really seasoned man grocer to have the knowledge or the patience to probe such nuances with customers. Amongst today’s homemakers, there are so many educated and competent women, who cannot take up formal work because it means commuting away from home and inflexible hours. The option of owning/running a shop near home will bring a large number of women into the economic sphere.

Our field work reveals that most women shopkeepers took to the trade through force of circumstances – husband’s death, no one to look after family shop, etc. Gradually, this will become a positive work choice for women, near their homes. It has happened elsewhere in Asia. In Japan and Thailand, between 25-33 percent of neighbouring stores and franchises of 7 Eleven and Lawson corporate chains are owned and run by women.

But how will women build their skills and aptitude for retailing? Most shopkeepers start their ‘professional’ life as apprentices in shops that belong to a richer relative. After working hard for some years, they finally graduate to owning their own establishment. Men, therefore, learn the trade from a very young age. Women, of course, had no such experience. Until now. Lately girls and bahus are increasingly being inducted into the family shops, perhaps because the boy is busy with higher studies, and labour is increasingly hard to get. Secondly, the new female equivalent of the male apprentice is the store assistant in the organised retail sector, where over 50 percent of the workforce, are women. That’s where a lot of shopkeeping skills and interest will be developed amongst womenfolk.

A more nuanced but significantly greater tectonic shift will happen within the trading communities in India. These communities are often more conservative and harsh on keeping their women within the confines of the home. Those families who let their women work in their shops, will redouble their business bandwidth, tune their shops with the times much faster and compete well in the era of the modern malls.

And then, by 2015 or will it be 2018, another male bastion will be demolished. I am sure our shops and trade channels will be better behaved, better kept and gentler places as a result! As a customer and a fellow shopkeeper, I look forward to this change.

Try this experiment anywhere in India. In a supermarket billing queue, keep a polite distance of about a foot and a half between your trolley and the shopper in front of you.  Now count the number of ways in which fellow shoppers make sure that the gap is closed. See how someone simply comes along and steps right into the space in front. Just as you’re sending the interloper to the back of the queue, you experience the slight but firm nudge on your lower calf from the trolley behind you. When you turn back, the person with the trolley will make a gentle gesture for you to move forward. If you continue to resist the myriad ways in which people try to force you into closing the gap, it will soon be used by people as a corridor for ‘cutting’ across to the other side.

Some time back, on my request, Piyul Mukherjee and her Proact consumer research team repeated this very curious experiment in queues of all kinds in urban India – bus stops, train stations, airports, colleges, temples, fancy buffet counters in five star hotels, farmhouse marriage parties, multiplexes. The findings were illuminating and near identical. The conclusion of the study read as follows:

“If you leave a space measuring more than your forearm – from the tip of your finger to your elbow – between you and the person just ahead of you in a queue in India, such a gap, is just not feasible to sustain. It shall get bridged or occupied within 5 minutes”. We called it the “Elbow Push Factor”.

It was interesting to me that the elbow push factor rule applies with equal validity across income and social strata. Most readers of this post, me included, brought up on specific notions of polite civic behaviour, find ourselves outraged by this. We are taught to give room, be patient and respect the personal space of a couple of feet around others. But the forearm rule tells us that our collective behaviour is at complete variance with these notions of urban privacy. While we have ‘learnt’ to respect privacy, our inherent attitude towards it is somewhat different. For Indians, personal space isn’t defined in physical terms. We see nothing wrong or disrespectful or invasive in jostling each other around. Intellectually we might find such behaviour distasteful, but nonetheless it is part of our ethos and so cannot be dismissed. But do designers of public spaces adequately take into account our need for a little bit of crowding?

Culturally, we have always had a bias towards the collective. Our instincts of family, community, chawl and mohalla are still deep rooted. Even our gods are not individual heroes, but “family people”, unlike in the west. In an overcrowded country like India, we are natural, instinctive, benign intruders into each others’ lives. We see nothing wrong or uncouth in developing intimacy with another person, even a total stranger. We easily pick up conversations with strangers while waiting for our flight to board, or to be served at a fast food restaurant or even when we are sitting in a library. We are comfortable in crowded areas, be they weddings or marketplaces. So why should we balk at a little pushing?

With crowding comes competition. For as long as we remember, we have had to compete for everything, for money, goods, space and comfort. Need a bus? Push for a seat. Need college admission? Good luck with getting it! There are ten applicants for each seat. Need to see your favourite god? Darshan queues at the temple can be twenty four hours long. Less than a quarter of a century ago, you had to fight to get milk from a milk booth because of shortage. We have been competing with fellow shoppers, travellers, students and devotees for getting just a little ahead. In that mindset, “wasting” precious queue space just does not gel with our instincts. A gap in the queue is a potential competitive risk that makes us uncomfortable.

Some western retail pundits talk about the ‘butt brush factor’. That is, people don’t like getting jostled or bumped into, especially from behind. They get put off and reduce or completely give up purchasing when they encounter the ‘butt brush factor’ in a store. Funnily enough, in India, retailers who have taken this as gospel truth and worked hard to offer immunity from butt brush, find themselves struggling with inadequate numbers of customers. In the Indian scheme luxurious and spacious layouts are decoded as wasteful and therefore expensive by average customers! Indeed the colloquial speak in Hindi for spacious stores is not shaant (quiet or peaceful), but soona (forlorn, empty).

In a nation of a billion aspirants and unparalleled population density, the shortage of space and its implications for our behaviour are not going to vanish in a hurry. The queues with their ‘elbow push factor’ are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Those of us who are space planners, educationists, temple trustees, marriage party hosts or modern retailers, have to take this reality into account while designing our offerings. People actually feel reassured by a certain polite level of elbow push, a certain amount of competition as long as it does not degenerate into disorder and chaos. Otherwise people feel disoriented and even disregarded. Keeping a vigil is as important as moving forward. And aren’t we in a hurry to move forward?

If a chef comes, can talk of food be far behind? A little while back, I was at a tony little dinner after an art show in Mumbai. One of the guests was celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor. It was hard not to hear the food related conversation that people were having with him, about the easy availability of Japanese seaweed and their recipe for couscous salad and the great quality of herbs at organic food stores. Sanjeev listened with an absorbed look of concentration, and then whispered to me with amusement, ‘sab salad aur dressing ki baat kartey hain, par samosa chutney khaate hain” (everyone here talks of salad and dressings but loves their samosa chutney)!

Master Chef Sanjeev Kapoor of course didn’t mean what he said literally. Burmese khowsuey, Japanese tempuras, Lebanese baba ganoush are regular offerings at parties in upmarket homes. Five years ago one would have had to do a Wikipedia search to find out what Quinoa and Amaranth meant. Today, any health food fan knows what they are. Sushi kits are hot sellers at exclusive food stores like Foodhall and Nature’s Basket. Yes, global food is truly growing and becoming interesting in India. It is an important marker, a badge of sophistication for people who are climbing up the well-being ladder. You “need to know” how to say ‘guacamole’ without an accent and “need to have” avocados and asparagus in your refrigerator, if you want to signal arrival to yourself, and others around you.

And yet, Indians want their samosas and parathas while also seeking modernity, sophistication, premiumisation of what they eat and offer. From that point of view, the Indian palate wrapped up in modernity is a recipe for magic, a much bigger magic. There are many more consumers for an exotic samosa than there are for guacamole, and that is going to remain the case for the foreseeable future. Most local canny vendors of food have already understood this. The other day, I went to buy dhokla from a popular snack shop in the neighbourhood. “Sir, which dhokla?” was the question tossed at me by the counter girl, who then offered me a taste of the amazing range… cheese dhokla, sandwich dhokla, tiranga, schezwan, crisp and of course, the original khaman dhokla. The most popular varieties were cheese and tiranga! All the fancy new variants were priced 30 percent above the good old khaman; nobody cared about the price.

At a recent banquet, I was served traditional Konkani sol kadi in shot glasses. The starters included pav bhaji in martini glasses with a slice of crusty flatbread.

These days, I get to enjoy a far wider and more interesting variety of panipuri’s in all weddings, from different parts of the country, than I have ever done in my life. Indian street food has been ‘discovered’ by society all over again, albeit with a more sophisticated twist.

A huge discovery is that traditional Indian food still continues to be the biggest draw at all events. If I was looking for a much bigger phenomenon of sophistication of food, and a real mega food business opportunity in India, I should be taking the ‘but, eat samosa’ hint from Sanjeev Kapoor. Whenever anyone has cracked this magic, a marketing explosion has followed. Nestle’s Maggi was all about making noodles ‘desi’, while Lays’ Kurkure was all about making the Indian bhujia more sophisticated and ‘western’. Small entrepreneurs and shopkeepers are also climbing this bandwagon. Indian manufacturers like Haldiram’s, with their Bisleri water panipuris at their retail outlets and bhelpuri combo packs in modern packaging, have figured which way the wind is blowing.

In simpler, less sophisticated times recipe innovation and transmission happened through the conventional powerful channel of granny to mum and aunts to our kitchens. Today this process is too gradual for the rapidly exploding and impatient expectations of the Internet age consumer. The new recipe and knowledge transmission channels are TV shows, YouTube and Web pages. And the new grannies are celebrity chefs, Google ‘uncle’ and Wiki ‘aunty’. And the consumers are lapping it all up. I love it when I see “Six interesting things to do with leftover rice”, from Sanjeev Kapoor. That’s six grannies together! I clap when I’m offered the choice of branded Bombay Bhel or masala dosa rolls, neatly modified and packaged, on flights. They have to still improve their recipes, but I’m waiting; not settling for a bland lettuce and mayo sandwich!

The fact is, people want to celebrate their evolving purchasing power and tastes through exotic food, while remaining close to what they have grown up liking. To do this, they need to be helped. As in most consumer products, in this also, it needs the expertise of master chefs, food specialists, large brands and their product teams to bring in sophistication and bold experimentation. I believe the next level of magic will happen when Maggi aunty, Knorr chachi and Heinz uncle join in the ‘samosa sophistication’ opportunity. There are some signs. For instance, Pillsbury has just acquired local brand Parampara. It’s a small but emphatic start. A huge branded business opportunity is waiting in the wings. The customer is ready; but I hope the next ‘Masala Maggi’ makers are listening?