Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Frog in a Boil - Indian Retail - is This Where We Are?

Most often in life changes don't come is perceptible torrents that we should sit up to take notice. Changes good and bad, happen and are happening in tiny tiny measures that we don't sometimes see, until either it's too late to correct, or if it's a good thing, goes unnoticed.

This is like a frog in a boil. The narration goes that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will obviously jump out. But what if you put the frog in water that is at room temperature? It will happily swim in it's small world pool. Now if you light a low fire under the pot, a very low and slow one, the water heats up almost without having changed anything to frog. It's body adjusts quickly to the heat, till it become too late.

I have this nagging feeling that Indian retailing has been quite like that. In all the years in retail I have not seen significant changes. Infact things have even gone down at the store level. In Foodworld I remember as a VP Operation we ran a drill every day called STUC- Show that you care. Every cashier wished every customer. As small and simple as that. Store being ready before that first consumer comes in. Face ups happening at 3pm. And many small nuances by now would have become hygiene, for the staff and consumer. But check outs are as slow, stock are as high, range is lower, neatness is lower.

Is there a realization that retailers must be on constant vigil so that the small things are corrected and bettered.

Are we on a boil. Well Friedman regret in his latest book "that used to be US", that the US is surely that way. We know for a fact that China is not.