Smallest format Retail: Pani Puri Walas

While writing on retail, what attracted my attention recently is the mushrooming of the smallest format retail all over Bangalore. It is the ubiquitous Pani Puri stalls that have come up in last year or so. I used to miss good Gol Gappas in Bangalore and there were countable number of places in town where you could go and savor this delightful snack. But over last one year or so they have emerged in every nook and corner of the city. You can easily spot one outside almost every big retail store.

These Pani Puri walas are probably the smallest format of retail. They just sell one item: Pani Puris and that too in may be not more than couple of variant i.e. khatta or meetha (sour or sweet). Format is simple, you stand around the stall and you are given a disposable bowl made up of dried and compressed leaves. So by eating a Pani puri you are not impacting the environment in anyway, unlike the more sophisticated places where you get disposable holders made up of paper, plastic or thermocol, all of which have a degrading impact on the environment. You will be served Pani puris in turns, and the last Pani puri is usually a dry one. You can ask for extra water at the end if you like having an extra serving of it at no extra cost. Pay Ra 10/- and make way for the people waiting for their turn.

The outlet or the stall occupies around 1ft X 1ft space on the floor and about 3ft X 3ft space on the platform. The way the compact space is managed is an excellent example of optimized space utilization. In that small space they have some thousand odd Pani Puris, which are stacked in such a way that these fragile beings are not hurt and lost. It is probably a good example of how packaging should be done. Along with this are at least three large vessels containing the yummy water in two varieties and filling of potatoes and chhole or chick peas. There is a box stacked on top of these vessels somewhere that stores the masalas. There are various polythene bags hanging from the bottom of the platform, which hold things like disposable bowls, paper napkins, lemons for that last dry pani puri, boiled potatoes and chic peas for refilling as and when the vessel goes empty. All the items are creatively tied with a rope and nothing ever falls.

They sell only in the evenings, typically from 5 PM – 9 PM, a neat 4 hour work day. I spoke a few of them and most of them hail from Allahabad in UP and are in some way or other are related to each other.One big family in business, literally dominating the Pani puri business in Bangalore. The typical turnover per day is about 800-1000 Rs a day for a strategically located stall. Owning a stall costs around 2000-2500 Rs. Pricing of the items is interesting, a plate of Pani puri is always priced at Rs 10/-, and what changes from vendor to vendor or rather location to location is the no. of puris that you get for that 10 Rs. Now is this not an interesting pricing model, where the price point is fixed, no matter where you eat across the city, but depending on my costs and advantage points I change the quantity that I serve. The price point is small enough to attract repeat customers from every strata of society every time the stall is in their sight.

If you think I have written this piece with a huge bias towards Pani Puris and the people who provide them, you are absolutely right :-)

Retail & Consumers – Followup

My last post citing incidents from experiences across retail stores is the first post out of some 250 odd posts, where no one disagreed with me and people just kept adding their own experiences. Apart from comments at desicritics and on my blog, I also received a lot of e-mails and a few phone calls including one from a customer services head of one of the stores that I had mentioned in the post. Now what I infer from all the feedback and rejoinders to the post is what I am trying to put across in this post.

Billing fraud in retail stores is much bigger than I had imagined. While writing about it, I was not very sure if I am doing the right thing, as it could have been series of co-incidences with me, but the replies to my post confirm that the organized fraud in retail stores can be much bigger than I first thought, or much bigger than what we can manage to ignore. There are two perspectives to this potential fraud. One is from the customers or consumers perspective, who are the ones being cheated. Now as a customer I have no clue if the employee at the counter is cheating or the retail store is also involved in the process. To me as a consumer the employee standing at the counter is nothing but the representative of the retail organization, so from my perspective the retail organization is cheating me. At the same time, if I flip the situation and see it from retailer’s perspective, they could also be at the suffering end from this problem, as the employees pocket the money or the items from the wrong billing and though store may not suffer financially but they do suffer in terms of brand value and customer loss.

Second, area of poor customer service also has ironical viewpoints when observed from customers and retailers perspective. Almost all customers feel that there are far too many people on the shop floor. On top of it, they do not know anything about what they are selling in the store, where is it located and basically are useless from the customer perspective. You would usually find salespersons cuddled together in a corner and often see customers and their queries as an interruption. All our friends in retail think they do not have enough people and quality of people is a big issue.

I can not comment about the quality of people, as that seems to be an issue across the industries. But I am sure retailers need to seriously look at number of people they deploy on the shop floor and also their knowledge of the products. In grocery stores, it should not be very tough. Probably training needs to involve usage of not so common items by staff members, so that they know about what the customer is asking for. Let me take an example, you go and ask for Tofu to any salesperson and they would not know about it, probably because they have never used it themselves, and while it is lying in the shelves they would often mistake it for Paneer or Cheese. As far as the number of people is concerned, I am sure retailers are using some benchmark numbers which may have come from the western world, and hence may not be relevant as such in India. They probably need to work out the no. of people on the shop floor based on total area of the store, the cultural element, expected footfalls and usability of those people to the customers. I am sure customers would prefer less people, who can help them when required and not intrude them when not required. I seriously believe that the retailers who can manage their customer servicing are the ones who are going to survive or thrive.

The only point in time solution that I can think of is to ‘Check your bills properly every time you shop.’ Do not think that since there is a bar code reader and a computer involved, nothing can go wrong. There are those fingers on the machine that have mastered the art of manipulating the system and hence you. Doordarshan’s ads on ‘Jago Grahak Jago’ seem to be just in time.

PS: Can’t help sharing another incident that happened last evening. I went to Nilgiris, and picked up an item which came in two sized, the smaller priced at Rs12/- and the larger one prices at Rs22/- , and picked up the smaller one. I had only 4 items in the basket and since my last post I have been observing the behavior of people at the counters even more keenly. The lady the counter swipes the items on the barcode reader, and when she swipes the above mentioned item the bar code reader correctly picks up the item and shows Rs12/- on the screen. The lady very quickly goes and changes the item code and the screen now shows Rs22/- . I asked her what is she doing, she first gives me a look og ‘what did I do?’, and then when I tell her what she did, she says Sorry as rudely as possible and then corrects the bill. Then in her frustration, gives me Rs1.50 less than what she is supposed to return, when I ask for the same, she takes out and gives me as if she is obliging me. I was amazed to see the manipulation done with immense ease.

Bloggers...

Got it from one of the forwarded mails....:-)

The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson

Medici effect refers to the creative environment created by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy in 16^th Century. And the author gives insights into how to create that effect again and create spurts of innovation in your environment. Frans refers to this phenomenon as ‘Intersection’, you may refer to this term as ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas from various fields as well. So essentially what the author is saying is identify opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas, or get to a point that is on the intersection of unrelated fields, generate a lot of ideas combining the two fields, probably creating something new.

It’s a small book full of stories and anecdotes that are used as examples to illustrate the power of Intersection. There is a good analysis of how people from different dimensions come together and build a new dimension, how to unleash your own creativity you need to get out if your network and your comfort zone and put yourself in an absolutely new environment and that is when you learn fast and apply your knowledge of multiple fields to generate new ideas.

To apply this to an organization situation would take as much effort as any other innovation technique. Organization will have to create environment and platform for such intersections to happen and then to create a framework to evaluate and take forward the ideas that are hence created.

Read the book more for the examples and the stories, some of them are very interesting and not so well known, but otherwise it is a nice read, may not be something drastically different from what you already know if you are in the innovation space.

To hike or not to hike

There are some arguments for which both sides weigh equally. In my opinion the question that ‘should the fees for higher education institutes like IITs and IIMs be hiked or not’ is one such question where the arguments for both increasing and not increasing have the equal weight and you have a difficulty deciding which side you should be on.

Those in favor of not increasing the fees are right as whatever economic progress that India has achieved in last couple of decades is primarily because of the investment in education and the availability of higher and quality education at extremely affordable prices. By increasing the fees, we are going to make the education unaffordable for a large section of society, which in turn would only contribute to the social divide that haunts us all the time. While there are education loans available, but for the affected sections getting those loans is next to impossible, and the ones who can afford probably do not need those small loans.

On the other hand, to make the institutions sustainable it is important to increase the fees. The amount of money spent on each student is far higher than the hikes fees also, so it seems perfectly fine to raise the fees, which after hike also remains the most economical education in the world. Another argument in favor of hiking the fees is that after passing out the first year salary of students is often more than their combined fees of the whole course, and the argument makes perfect sense. If the student earns all the wealth by virtue of being a student of the institute, should the institute not be adequately compensated too?

I agree to both these arguments completely, and I have been thinking of alternate or innovative ways to address both these two points of views. These are some of the ways I can think of:

· Fees should be hiked, but with a facility for deferred payment, where a student can pay a larger chunk after he passes out and starts working.

· Institutes can hold the formal degree till the student pays up completely.

· Financial institutions can relax the rules for financing and actually use the economic status as criteria to fund students. I am told that banks do not fund as there are lot defaults by students. Institutes can provide guarantee to banks and financing agencies by way of keeping some hook with the students till they pay off the complete loans.

· Students can be given an option to pay after they pass out, in which case they may be asked to pay even higher than the prescribed fees.

· Organizations that pick up the students with loans can have the option to pay for the loan. This can either be treated as the joining bonus or can be deducted from the salary of the hired student.

On second thoughts, these solutions look too simple to have not been thought by the people concerned, but may be this would make them think about these once again and address both sides of a valid argument.

Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor

This book is a very personal account of author’s relationship with world of books, both that he has read and those he has written. Books is a collection of 40 essays that he has written in various places about literature, books, book reviewers, critics, literary festivals and the role of literature in shaping up the society in general. He begins my talking about his childhood and his affair with books since then. How he used to read a book a day and how he moved reading from one genre to another. It is interesting to read about someone who has literally spent his life amongst books and who still remembers most details about his books.

One thing that Shashi loves to write about is diversity and multitudes in India and Indians. His famous lines for India are ‘It is not an underdeveloped country but a over developed country in the advanced state of decay’. He almost goes on rampage to answer people who tend to have a narrow view or their world view of India, and who from their point of views decide, what is Indian and who is Indian. He having spent his life in big cities in India and then a lot of it outside India, and having written about India in all his writing, tries to defend that he is as much an Indian as the farmer living in rural India, though they may have entirely different worlds. This point has been repeated so many times across articles that you almost know it by heart by the end of the book. He talks nostalgically about his St Stephen’s days and then goes on defend the contribution of Stephenians in Indian literature. In his witty style he says that he never took any course in writing or studied literature formally, as that would be like learning about girls in a medical school. But Mr Tharoor, having read so much of literature is no less than formal study of literature.

He talks fondly about his favorite authors, most of the pieces have been written at the anniversaries or centenaries of the authors. He also writes about some popular authors whom he did not find as great and I am sure pieces would have generated controversy as and when they were written. There are a lot pieces that he has written about Salman Rushdie and author’s admiration for him oozes out of each piece. There are few pieces where he has got back to his critics and book reviewers who have not been kind to him. In one piece, he has got back to a lady who has written about his Mallu attire in almost gory way, and you smell vengeance in that whole piece. He talks about various literary events and what goes on there. I particularly liked the piece on Baghdad where people have to sell books to survive.

Interestingly, he has been trying to help some publishers who have tried to keep literary traditions high in India. He specifically mentions Indian Review of Books founded by Chennai based publishing house East-West books, Yeti Publications from Kerala and Oxford University Press’s national integration series. He is sincerely hoping that IRB would be revived by someone and I hope I would able to do that sometime, help initiatives like IRB come alive again.

Retail in India – A Consumer Experience

As you travel across the city, or across cities in India, you can see the much predicted retail boom happening everywhere. There are shopping malls, supermarkets, hypermarkets and big format retail chains everywhere. Not sure how many people actually understand the difference between these terms, but the mantra is big format shopping space, a place where you have to go using a vehicle as it is not very close to your house, you have to pay for parking, have to go around the store collecting items you want to buy in a basket or a trolley and then stand in a seemingly non-moving queue waiting for your bill to be processed. If you are lucky, you will have a flawless bill with all the free / discount items packed with your shopped items, but more often than not this is usually not the case. I am using this post to summarize my retail experience through a series of incidents, which are primarily from retail chains in Bangalore, and I am assuming the experience may not be very different across cities.

Shoppers Stop: I get some 3-4 e-mailers informing me of the annual sale at Shopper’s stop. I am sure company has spent enough money to communicate the sale information to the customers, and the impact is that I do stop by while passing through one of the outlets. I enter Shopper’s stop and see the sale being announced from every corner through various marketing material. I am looking for certain things, but could not make out of this is on sale or not, I ask the nearest available sales person and she says ‘What Sale? There is no sale.” Just in time, I get a SMS on my mobile, from Shoppers Stop announcing the sale and show this to the person and she shows me a blank face. I point to the material shouting sale all over the store and this lady runs to her colleague and says “What are we supposed to do about sale?” Now, to me this is a classic case of wasted time, effort and resources, you spend so much to bring the customer to store, but when the customer lands, she feels almost let down.

Mobile Store: They have some huge stores in prime locations, considering the fact that selling of mobiles usually does not need so much of physical space. I had to buy a mobile phone and I wanted to exchange it with my old one. There were about 12 people wearing the red ‘Mobile Store’ T-shirts, and I assume they were all there representing the company and should be available for any help that the customer may need. There were 3 groups of 2s, who were busy talking with each other and were in no mood to halt their conversation to attend to the only customer entering the store. Probably they thought someone would attend me, which is a fair thought assuming the customer to salesperson ratio. Next there were a couple of ladies who were busy talking on the mobile and were so lost in the conversation that I am sure they did not even notice my entering the store. There were two people who were busy figuring out something on the only computer available on the store. There were two ladies sitting on a counter, looking nowhere and lost in their thoughts. I looked around to see the most approachable face and discover that no one is looking at me, probably in the hope that someone else would look at and attend. I walk up to the guys who are on the computer and say I am looking for buying a new mobile phone. He looks up as if I am an interruption and says “Which one?” I tell him my requirements and ask him to suggest mobiles for the same and he wears a completely confused look. I give up and say the models that I had researched before stepping out to buy and he points me to dummies of those models in a glass window. Finally with no hope of any help or information, I ask him for the buy back price for the old mobile, he makes some frantic calls here and there and says, if you leave the mobile here, I can tell you tomorrow. Now I do not even know where to classify this experience. 12 people on the floor, with absolutely no knowledge of the countable number of products they sell, unable to attend a single customer with absolutely defined requirements. 10% of the number of people with a decent knowledge about the most commonly used product would have helped.

More: Erstwhile Fabmall, and newly christened ‘More’, opened its new outlet near my house and I went there to buy my monthly groceries. By now I do not expect any help from any of the people floating around and fill my trolley with my month’s supply and stand in the queue. The bill amount appears a bit too much to me, but looking at the long queue I pay and come out. I sit in the car and something tells me that I should total the bill, I do that and discover the discrepancy of 300 Rs on a bill of Rs 1500/- , a good 20% amount. I go back to the store with bill in my hand and the guy quietly says Sorry and hands me 300 Rs. I ask for the store manager, but he is expectedly missing at such times, and no one has his cell number.

Westend: I went to pickup some gifts for my new born nephew. I liked something that was in 1-2 year section, but could not find the same thing in new born section. I asked the salesperson around if she could help me find the same item in the 0-3 months section and she plainly said ‘No, not available!’, and just when I turned around, I could find the item and looked at the salesperson and she said ‘If it is available, take it’. Again some 10-12 people on the floor, with no knowledge of what they are selling, what the inventory is and no effort to re-arrange the items meshed up by customers. I spoke to the store manager and got the most customer unfriendly response ‘Please buy whatever you can find, we can not help you with anything’.

Reliance Fresh: There is always an extra item added to the list, in case total number of items exceeds a certain number. If you discover, they say sorry and rectify, if you don’t, they made it. Though I can not say this organized fraud on this small sample, but I am getting inclined to think so and this may be prevailing across stores, especially on weekends where the places are so crowded that most people may not bother to check the bills for small amounts.

Subhiksha: All salesperson are sitting in one corner and chatting away. You ask for something and they take 2-3 minutes to decide which one of them will respond. Finally one person walks up to you, almost making you feel guilty for coming in way of the conversation, only to say he does not know.

Landmark: This up market bookstore plays some jarring music, and this is the reason I do not enjoy going there for exploring books. Once I had to go there to use the gift vouchers I received on my birthday, and I was there right after the store opened and again I was the only customer. The music was too loud for my comfort and I asked them to reduce it and they point blank refused saying there are other customers. I looked around and said where, and they obliged me by reducing it by one level. As soon as I reached the shelves, the music was up by about 5 levels, making it impossible for me to concentrate on books. I gave it one more try but I guess letting employees play music at their levels and their kinds is Landmark’s way of retaining employees. I had no option but to walk out.

M K Ahmed: Now this is a store that I love to shop at. It is not very big, but you find everything there. You can ask any person on the floor for anything and you would have that item in your hands within 2 minutes. They do not advertise any big discounts, but when you see the bill the discounts are very much there. Despite being as busy as any other store, you hardly spend any time in the queue. There is no show off, no jarring music, no lost employees, and no display of discounts that do not show up in the bill. Just plain simple customer service supported by the knowledge of the products being sold.

I seriously hope that as the retail space matures, organizations would look at educating their sales force about the products and the customers. Eventually, when there are stores everywhere, selling the same products at more or less the same price, customer service is what is going to dictate where the customers park themselves.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

This book was recommended by anyone who has read it, almost unanimously. The book is definitely different from the usual fiction written these days. It reminded me of the stories of survival that I used to read in Reader’s Digest as a kid. It’s just that this story was written in 300+ pages, and talks about sometimes believable and at times unbelievable incidents of survival and the twist at the end leaves you thinking, what to believe and what not to believe.

The protagonist of the story is a Pi Patel from Pondicherry, son of a Zoo keeper, who is born a Hindu but decides to follow Islam and Christianity as much as Hinduism. When he is 16, his family decides to immigrate to Canada along with some animals from the Zoo and one fine day they board a Japanese made ship to go to Canada. The ship sinks and Pi manages to be on life boat along with 5 other animals that include a 450 pound Bengal Tiger. For the first week animals keep feeding on each other and at the end there is Pi and the Tiger, named Richard Parker are left on the boat. The rest of the book is mostly a story of Pi’s 227 day survival on the boat with the tiger. The details are very well worked out, and they almost make you feel as sick as those on the boat. The gory details of how Pi manages food for himself and the tiger can make you puke now and then. There is a fantastical element of a carnivorous island and carnivorous trees that Pi lives on for some weeks and this is where you start thinking if the story is true or an element of fantasy.

In the end the author brings in another story of Pi’s survival, which is very simple and to any human, more believable logically. But the author leaves you at that and you keep wondering which story to believe in. There are lots of insights that the author gives about the survival techniques that castaways probably use and the psychology of what they go through and what keeps them going. Most readers would get to know a lot about the animal world, how they are managed in Zoos, in circuses and their behavior when they are stuck with you in a life threatening situations.

Interestingly Pi is named after a swimming pool in France and though the author does not say this, but does his naming had to do with the fact that he had to spend so much time in the water…a take away from one of the Naming theory, which says that your name is an indicator of what has in store for you.

Raga Mala by Pt Ravi Shankar

This autobiography completes a small biographies shelf in my library. The book has been well designed to give and gives you a feeling that you are reading something special. There is a lot of Golden color used, both on the cover and inside in text and in pictures. There are beautiful pictures from Ravi’s all phases and tracks of life. It is edited and introduced by George Harrison, who considered Ravi Shankar his guru and his comments are interspersed in the story throughout the book. There are some quotes here and there by some other people who played a key role in his life. The chapters are beautifully names after all the Ragas that Ravi has created.

Pt Ravi Shankar is an icon and we have grown up reading about him, his music, his awards, his experiments and his colorful personal life. He talks about all this in this book, but apart from this there is a lot that you get to read about him, especially about his family and early childhood. His brother Uday, who was probably far more successful that Ravi and was instrumental in giving Ravi a global exposure while he was still in his teens. He talks about his parent’s relationship, which was restricted only to producing children and who shared nothing beyond the children that they produced. But as he grows up, he understands why it is difficult for his father to relate to his mother, the gaps in their upbringing, their education, maturity levels and social exposure. His father was a well known figure in the British India and was probably from the first generation of global Indians. His brother Uday was close follower, who was a renowned dancer and toured across the globe with his dance troupe, performed across the world, lived in France for a while and finally setup a dance school in Almora. Ravi started participating in his dance performances, as a dancer to begin with, till he discovered that it was Sitar that is his destiny.

Once he figured out Sitar, he went on to learn from his guru Allaudin Khan, who was lovingly called Baba in Maihar. Circumstances led him to marry his guru’s daughter, while he was in love with two other women at that point in time and knew very well that he had no fondness for the girl he is marrying. Nonetheless, she played an important part in shaping up his initial career as she herself was an accomplished musician and a disciple of her father. Ravi never had a happy marriage with her, and he blames his marriage for certain missed opportunities in his career, though he seems to have no apology for the fact that he was always living with some women while he was still married. He and his wife had one son, with whom he got to spend time at a very late stage in life and that is when he tried to promote him in music world. The son died very early. Other prominent women Kamla and his current wife Sukanya, also went through a lot to be with him. I am sure all the others whose name he has not mentioned, but he was associated with also must have suffered, but the amazing fact is that they still wanted to be with him despite knowing what they were getting into. Finally, he talks with lot of care and affection about his daughter Anoushka, who seems to be the chosen heir for his music and life. He still does not talk about Norah Jones, he keeps referring to her as my other daughter.

He talks in detail about his musical journey, his days at Maihar with his guru and his family, his establishing himself as a global musician, his associations with Beetles and other prominent musicians from across the world throughout the later half of 20^th century. He talks about his struggle to take the Indian music to international audiences and the image that he had of being a pop star. He talks about his struggle to imbibe discipline in his audience, small things like insisting that he would sit in a raised platform while performing, no matter where he is performing, no tolerance for anyone not listening respectfully and an explanation of Ragas at the beginning of each concert. He describes his experience at Woodstock festival as a place where ‘music is incidental’, and how he did not enjoy performing amongst everyone under the influence of drugs. He described his experiments of creating music with variety of people, styles and instruments. He comes out as someone who is ready to explore and experiment any time. He describes various forms of music and the music from various places also very beautifully; you can almost feel it as you read it.

An interesting reading….

Reflections on the Art of Living – A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane K Osbon

There are very few books that you read and you know you will keep going back to them. This is one such book. Joseph Campbell is well known for his work in Myths and in comparative religion. In his research on Myths, he has studied most of the religions of the world and can present an interesting comparison. He is greatly influenced by eastern religions specifically Hinduism and Buddhism. He quotes a lot of times from eastern literature such as Upanishads and Vedas. He uses a lot of Buddhist stories to make a lot of points.

This book has been complied from discussions that Campbell had with 10 of his students during a 30 day period in 1984, where they had gathered for intensive exploration of mythological dimension. It is broadly divided into 3 segments – Living in the World, Coming into awareness, Living in the Sacred. In the first section he talks about everyday living, in the second about becoming aware of oneself and one’s connectedness or oneness with the rest of the world and in the third he talks about creating your own scared space and living with it. He covers wide range of things, almost anything that touches your life spiritually. It is impossible to review such things so I would just quote some of the words from the book:

The privilege of lifetime is being who you are.

Life is without meaning.
You bring meaning to it.
The meaning of life is
Whatever you ascribe it to be.
Being alive is the meaning.

The heroic life is living the individual adventure.

Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

If you want the whole thing,
The gods will give it to you.
But you must be ready for it.

As you go the way of life,
You would see a great chasm,
Jump
It is not as wide as you think.

When you follow your passion,
Society’s help is gone.
You must be very careful.
You’re completely on your own.

It takes courage to do what you want.
Other people have a lot of plans for you.
Nobody wants you to do what you want to do.
They want you to go on their trip, but you can do what you want.

Find a place where there is joy,
And the joy will burn out the pain.

If you connect with these words, you would probably enjoy reading this book and Joseph Campbell in general.