New Temples of Consumerism

Although it has been said again and again that only 3 % of retail in India is organizaed whereas rest is highly unorganized mom n pop store format but when I travel from Andheri to Mindspace , I feel exactly opposite . To name just a few mega malls which cross my way in are Fame Adlab , In orbit , Infinity , Megamall , Hypercity , Shoppers stop , Evershine , Shubhichha and what not ( My batchmate Ganesh informed me that currently 7.5% of retail market in India is organized and it is expected to go upto 20% by 2010, So it has increased for sure). half of these are located in very close vicinity to each other. A grand addition to the list is newly opened Star bazaar where you get every thing of daily need , probably the model was to repeat wallmart's mantra of big volume in low price , so most of SKUs are packed in relatively bigger chunks, I will not say the discounts are as bigger as smaller stores will offer .

One of the other innovation of Indian retail is having food joints within these stores , Big bazaar , shoppers stop already had it , same is done by Marks and spencer as well as star bazaar . These food joints are growing bigger day by day adding almost everything from Veg biryani to street food in thier menu. They do fetch some additional revenue speciall if people are coming just to do some window shopping , gourmet food can still make them spend some extra bucks without feeling guilty.

The recent realization by retailers is simple , no matter what happens people will spend money on food , vegetables and daily grocery items . Now a very large portion of entire mat is devoted to it which include green vegetables , fruits and even grains !

The challenge in front of consumer remains selecting the best and cheapest option , all of the retailers making branded goods available to thier consumers which leave them with selecting best price and the difference is not small . I planned to purchase Noka Music express 5310 which is priced over 10K in hypercity , 9600 in Nokia Service stores and around 9300 in Spencers , isn't it amazing that one of the retail format is able to sell cheaper then original manufacturer.

Whatever the case is options are many , these modern temples of consumerism are definetly attracting many ( and mind you with family and freinds) and leaving no stone unturn to pull some money out of thier pocket . I call them temples because these are the places where people go when they want to shop and also when they don't want to , when they are happy and also when they are stressed , also an obvious rush in festive seasons . Overall outcome will be a push to econmoy , to inflation and to some numerical predictions ( which are most of the time any way baseless) .
So Are you contributing to countries economy?