Kirana shops Vs. Quick Commerce. When will the government step up?

Shops around me are rapidly shutting down, getting replaced by soulless dark stores. It's obviously a part of a larger trend, and it must be stopped at war footing or the cascading effects of it could wreck the entire country.

Over 2 Lakh Kirana stores have shut shop in the last year alone.

According to a comprehensive report by All-India Consumer Products Distributors Federation, India has about 1.3 Crore shops in total. 17 Lakh of these are in Metros, which on an average sell about ₹5.5 Lakhs of merchandise every month. 12 Lakh of such shops exist in Tier 1 cities, with average monthly sales of ₹3.5 Lakhs. And the rest 1 Crore exist in Tier 2 and beyond, generating average sales of ₹2.5 lakh each month.

As a part of this VC driven carnage of Indian general retail, Metros have lost about 1 Lakh Kirana stores just last year. Rest of the closures came from Tier 1. The mayhem is yet to reach Tier 2 and beyond.

So what happens when a Kirana store is shut down?

Firstly, it doesn't just lead to one solitary job loss. Most Kirana stores are family operations with atleast 3 people engaged full-time in making the store run round the clock. So a direct hit on 3 dignified, respectable jobs (which pay alright and run a family or two) is where it begins.

But then, a bunch of 50-100 retailers are supplied by 4-5 distributors of different categories. Each of whom also engage 5-8 people on a full time basis, not including the proprietor and accountant. Again, these are decent jobs. Catering to entire families.

And then, there are feet-on-street people, contracted by large FMCG companies, whose job is to manage shelf space, inventory and give product samples/customer demos. Each of these people manage about 100 stores.

So, in effect, if you're looking at 100 retailers shutting down, you're looking at somewhere around 400-500 people going out of work. And this is not counting the second order effects, i.e. people who depend on these folks indirectly.

Therefore, the 1 Lakh store closures that have happened in the last year alone, in just metros, have easily led to around 5 Lakh job losses, conservatively. Hurting about 3 Lakh families directly. And these are not the extremely sad delivery boy jobs which have people running 12 hours for a meagre pay of ₹20,000 before expenses. A lot of these (the retailers, distributors, vendors) are self employed families which are a part of the community. And have always been.

When they go out of work in their own community, you're not just destroying a business, you're also destroying the fabric of that community itself.

The platforms responsible for this are running on negative contribution (in some cases gross) margins on the back of "funding", and will continue to run on losses for a period long enough to screw the little guy and destroy everything. This isn't a fair fight. It's textbook anti-competitive, predatory pricing led monopolisation of an entire ecosystem.

The Indian Government needs to step up. And quick. Or it could be too late.

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