The joys of home delivery

A large part of our daily life goes in running errands - shopping for groceries, giving clothes to the ground-floor ironing man and waiting for it to come back, following up with the domestic help, fixing the water tank, the torn mesh net, and the faulty electric switch. For a woman, the list goes slightly longer, to include regular trips to the beauty parlour to monitor hair growth in the body, cracks in the feet, and uneven growth of hand nails. This, and that, and all of this, take up a lot of time, eventually cutting down the time you can spend doing nothing, or doing something you like (which could be eating out with friends, or watching a movie). For more and more people living in neutral families, and more single working population, who are "servant-less" (as Julia Child coined the word) or without a live-in domestic help, this seems like everyone's life. And I forgot to mention the plight of those who have working Saturdays, leaving only a meagerly Sunday to wrap up household errands.

Grocery shopping in India is traditionally done on weekends from local bazaars. Fresh fruits and fresh meat are bought once a week, if not more often. Local thela-walas also come knocking on doors to sell fresh sabji  in the morning. If you are a home-maker, or have an elderly retired person in the house, this would be the ideal way to pick up fresh produce for a cooking. However, with the paucity of time, and families becoming more nuclear, spending so much time, every weekend, to follow this procedure becomes a bit cumbersome and often tiring. 

And then came the shopping malls in India, with chains like Big Bazaar. Of course, there have been some already existing chains like Niligiris super-markets which have been there successfully for a much longer time, but these are mostly more localized super markets, only present in certain cities. Kishore Biyani slowly transformed the shopping habits of lower and middle class by giving more value for money. Along with this, his intelligent use of "organized chaos" meant that he meant the transition from local sabji mandi to an air-conditioned, but non-intimidating shopping mall very comfortable for an average Indian homemaker.  In his book, "It happened in India", he acknowledged using clever tricks like opting for a lower open entrance as opposed to a more intimidating jazzy glass entrance, adopting more local themed advertising, and using a more "bum touching another bum" sort of a crowd sabji mandi feel, hiring salesmen and saleswomen less smarter than the average consumer, etc. All this worked very well for Big Bazar. 

But, that doesn't mean that Big Bazar became a profitable organization. It didn't. Biyani's Future Group had a highly leverage balance sheet, to the extent that he had to sell off his flagship Pantaloons chain to the Aditya Birla Group a couple of months back. Anyone who is conversant with the retail industry would tell that it is an expensive and long term proposition, investing in retail requires immense patience in a market like India. Sourcing and supply chain constraints make it difficult for such chains to be profitable in a short period of time. 

There is of course one aspect that everyone talks about - how Indian consumers are value oriented. Rama Bijapurkar in her book "We are like this only" made a strong point that price is not the only factor that determines what an Indian consumer would buy. Rather, the Indian consumer would seek more value in a product. True it is, and I do not contest this understanding. But is value the only factor that determines consumer behaviour ? Does one also not need to look at "convenience" as a factor ?

Big shopping malls have played the "convenience card" for a long time. Under one roof you get everything. It is faster, more convenient, as they claim, saving time. The online retail shopping portal bigbasket.com runs advertisement of how everyone in Bangalore seems to be hoarding movie theatres suddenly, apparently because they all shop at bigbasket.com, which saves them all the time they would have spent had they gone grocery shopping. Walmart and Tesco, when they enter India, would sell the convenience card as well, offering the biggest shopping extravaganza under one roof. Would it work ? 

From my own shopping experience, what the "convenience" argument does not take into account is that stepping into a big shopping mall (like Big Bazar) still takes time. Even if shopping is faster, billing isn't not. There are long queues, that take on a weekday, anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes, to wrap up billing. Daniel Kahnman in his seminal work says that the memory that you have is not how the experience was, but the experience ends. So, a brilliant concert that ended with a technical glitch in the last ten minutes, with noise problems, will only last in our memories as a bad concert, since all we will take out of the concert hall is the bad memory of the noise glitch in the last few minutes. If this were true, long billing time would be the lasting memory one would take out, often negating the satisfying experience of how good the values were and how convenient it was to find brocoli, zuchchini and gobi and tinda all under the same roof. It is also more likely to  have a longer lasting of the process being a lot longer than it really was. If I were a homemaker, I wouldn't mind it as much, but I am a working woman, would I still not mind it ?

Does this mean that online retail chains like bigbasket.com would be a success ? While the whole process of grocery list making can be done in 10 minutes, the slot for delivery is a span of 3 hours, which means, you still have to hang around at home for those three long hours to get the delivery. 

This kept me thinking that perhaps the only way out from this would be to have a system where one can get the grocery delivered to me at my door-step even when I am not at home, when I do not have to be at home to pick it up. This could be done if we had sort of a letter box, albeit a much bigger one, outside the house, which would, say, have a number lock which you share with the vendor. A more advanced version of it might even have refrigeration ones. This would mean that grocery can come a couple of hours before I am home, and I can pick it up whenever I am home, without having to wait at home. A product like this can be made frugally, and can be of immense use. This would also be helpful if grocery shops send fresh cut and chopped vegetables and marinated meat a couple of hours before you can reach home. All you need to do is to take it out and cook. Like I mentioned earlier, our fresh food eating culture will not shift to canned food like the Americans are used to. Rather, we will continue eating fresh cooked food, only cutting down the preparation time. Cooking time, as we know, is a prolonged process for ordinary food. What is a more cumbersome process is the preparation time, chopping, defrosting and marinating. These are also more physically exhaustive process than just putting something on low flame on an oven. 

In effect, what I am saying, in addition to keeping a refrigerator inside your kitchen, keep a refrigerator outside for the grocery to be filled up at your convenience. What is the risk of it being stolen (assuming the product would have something to fix it to the wall) - you lose some onions, carrot, and may be a small refrigerator, which is a lot less expensive than losing a car, which is also kept outside and not stolen that easily ! This is in line with my earlier post where I had suggested keeping the kitchen door open from outside and detached from the main door, to ensure that the domestic help can come anytime without you to be in the house to open and guard the house. 

This would help smaller mom and pop shops which can deliver fresh grocery at any time. Bigger malls can also benefit, because it would substantially decrease the consumer load on weekends. Bigger malls could also cut down on cost by making expansive, expensive spread out malls and shift to smaller super market models with local delivery options. This would also help online retailers who can now have delivery options spread out all through the week, as opposed to prime slots on weekends. Home delivery option at ease will also help home-makers who limit their extensive weekend and monthly shopping to weekends, when they can have a mode of conveyance, like a car, back home or a help from another family member to have all the stuff carried back home. If that didn't have to happen, shopping can be done on comparatively less crowded slots.  

This home delivery system can exist with the existing mom and pop shops, online retail and other players like a super markets. While going to a grocery shop still doesn't go out of fashion, with the consumers still feeling the need to touch and feel the grocery before buying like it is done in local shops, it can become a monthly affair when one goes to shop for monthly provisions like wheat, dal, atta for the whole week. The remaining re-fills can be done from a trusted shop which one frequents through refills by way of home delivery.