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.

3 comments:

  1. That's an interesting analogy. It is indeed true that as an industry, retail has had few truly break through ideas since it's inception. No significant customer offering has been upgraded in over a decade. 

    The answer may not lie in replicating what has worked in the west. Let's take greeting a customer for example...in the west, it is customary for even a passer-by to "greet" a fellow passer-by even if they aren't acquainted. Culturally, we do not practice this in India. Sometimes, a genuineness of extending help is lost in an SOP-driven 'namaste' with a fake smile.

    I often wonder what breaking new ground for retail in India would be. How can one replicate what Steve Jobs did to the music, mobile phone, animation and personal computing industries to Retail? The answer to this could save the frog!

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  2. Vijay. I have a contrarian view to yours, just a bit.Best does not come always from break thru products or services. Japs have the best cars from Kaizen, it is slow and deliberate. steve is an innovator by circumstances of his birth, and unique and a genius. But what we need to learn is conscious improvements everyday!

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  3. Thanks for sharing your views, Sir. I guess there is always scope to do things a little better. I am often fascinated by how the smaller, 'non-chain' stores sometimes provide extraordinary service...and it's often the small things that count. I was recently at a small but well-run shop called mordern stores in ooty-the width of range they carried beat what most large stores do in big cities....but what caught my attention was the gentleman who did the baggage collection at the entrance. Despite being a cold, rainy day...and he probably does a 10 hour shift...he opens the umbrella for the customer and hands it over with a genuine smile and says thank you for shopping with us! That service-driven attitude is one improvement that many of the larger stores could benefit from...but it is not easy to replicate...

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