Monday, February 26, 2007

Retail Bubble

Suddenly its looks its all about Retail. Everybody wants to have a piece of this and everybody is scaling up like crazy. But has it helped in the ground level. I visited few of the leading retailers specially the super market formats and found service levels very pathetic, total indifference to the customer, no stock of fast moving products etc ? will i ever visit these outlets again? No way.

Will the small time neighborhood shops also fall a prey to this and convert themselves into franchisees of leading brands losing their identity? Will they also learn the lesson the hard way?

I was left wondering if this is another valuation game.Is to impress VC's? Is it that everybody is jumping on to cashout? or they really see some value add to the customer? Is it another Dotcom bubble thats ready to burst? can we do some crystal ball gazing?

Anbuchezhian

2 comments:

blaiq said...

It could very well that people are hoping to be bought out. Check out the post and comments at To monetise or not...

blaiq said...

Anbu, you might be interested in this recent article about Indian retailing from The Economist : Getting cheaper and better.

You'll need to be subscribed to the Economist to read it. If you don't have access, do let me know and I shall mail you a txt file.