AS PERSONAL service goes, few big retailers can match the tailor-made offerings of India’s 15m or so tiny, family-owned shops known as kiranas. In addition to selling all manner of goods, most are happy to cut and deliver small amounts of fresh food—1kg of onions, say—and let customers buy on credit.
The steady advance of home-grown supermarket chains has so far done little to dim the kiranas’ prospects; and successive Indian governments have been reluctant to let in foreign grocers, for fear that many households would lose their livelihoods. With more than 200m Indians now able to access the internet on their mobile devices, e-commerce might appear a bigger threat. A clutch of Indian and foreign-owned online grocers has been set up in the past few years. Rather than supplying all their goods from central warehouses, however, most have struck partnerships with kiranas and other physical retailers. They employ an army of young workers to collect orders from kiranas and other local shops, and deliver them to the customer, often within the hour.
Aniket Moré, aged 18, is one such worker. His employer is Grofers (as in “grocery gofers”), founded in 2013. When...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1N9Ef5z
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