Retail News Update

Venu Gopal owns a slightly larger store opposite another supermarket a few kilometers away. Sitting on a stool behind a glass counter topped with plastic bottles of sweets and surrounded by closely packed shelves of rice, lentils, fruit juices and other groceries, he sells two or three sweets to children, a single cigarette to another customer, and tiny tobacco sachets every few minutes. “Our customers,” he says, “come for small quantities.”

Those are hardly the dire scenarios of doom forecast by opponents of India’s retailing revolution, who have taken to the streets to defend the livelihoods of more than 12 million mom-and-pop shop owners. In May and June hundreds of demonstrators armed with stones and bamboo sticks sacked Reliance stores in three cities, including Delhi. In Kolkata merchants marched to protest a Reliance contract to redevelop their market.

But in Hyderabad, the epicenter of the revolution, where Reliance Fresh has opened 50 brightly lit, Western-style stores in the past seven months as the front edge of a nationwide rollout, the reaction has been more muted. And the evidence seems to suggest there’s room for everyone – street sellers and mom-and-pop shops, known as kiranas, as well as large chains.

“Definitely there is room for both,” says Doma Trivedi, a franchisee of one of Reliance’s most successful supermarkets in Hyderabad, whose wife and brothers continue to run the family’s kirana a few kilometers away. “Everyone will have his own business. Smaller shops give credit and cater to people shopping on their way home from work, while Reliance Fresh gives correct measured weights and guaranteed prices.”