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In India, a Retail Revolution Takes Hold
Street vendors try to attract customers emerging from a nearby shopping mall, one of many that have sprung up in the booming suburbs of New Delhi.
(By Emily Wax -- The Washington Post)
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The crisis is already a reality for some small vendors. All over New Delhi, banners from the chain Subhiksha, which literally means "good bargain," advertise "Cheapest mangoes, best quality."
"We are the shop of the future," said Dheeresh Agnihotri, 24, who manages several of Subhiksha's 400 stores and who received an education stipend from the company, allowing him to go back to school for his MBA. "Soon all the little guys will want to work here."
Just down the road, a morose-looking Sharafat Hussein, 43, sat with his mango cart piled to the brim in the 105-degree heat. He's seen business drop by 40 percent. He had to pull his eldest son from school. He's gone into debt to pay for his mangoes. He can't afford to marry off his daughter. He sends half as much money to his aging parents.
"I get so sad when I see my customers getting in the car and coming back with bags of goods from the hypermarkets," he said, wiping the perspiration from around his eyes.
His one customer that afternoon, Pradep Hellan, a wedding photographer, said he doesn't want to drive out into India's version of urban sprawl or wait in lines at stores such as Subhiksha. He just rolled his car up to Hussein's carts, opened his wallet and bought his fruit.
"The little guy is just nicer, more Indian," he said.
Many Indians still enjoy the personal service and home delivery of their neighborhood vendors, often pillars in their community, extending credit to customers. Some also worry that shopping at huge stores, especially those stocked with Chinese-made goods, goes against not just their culture but also the father of the nation, Mohandas Gandhi, who preached that Indians should buy "homespuns," or locally made cloth.
But inside the MGF Mega City Mall, India's new class of mall rats harbored no such concerns. On a recent day, they could be seen downing thalis, or tiny bowls of rice, yogurt and cottage cheese, alongside greasy food from Pizza Hut. They flooded into Bollywood's No. 1 hit, "Ta Ra Rum Pum," along with "Spider-Man 3."
The luxury of being bored by the monotony of chain stores has apparently not yet occurred to most Indians. They relish the almost clinical shine and powerful air conditioning of malls, often repeating advertising slogans about "low costs, better quality and all under one roof," with cheerful optimism.
It is in the bookstores that the difference between the local shopkeeper and the chain stores could be felt.
Inside Spencer's Hyper Books and Beyond, instead of a wise bibliophile offering up dog-eared copies of Bengali literature and Islamic philosophy, there were teenage workers. They gathered around a computer, playing the profanity-laced hip-hop rhymes of Eminem. All the while, Indian families nearby blissfully thumbed through Disney storybooks.
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
