India is a nation of shopkeepers. Today, we boast a total of 14.6 million shops in the country. Look around. Even as you and I step out of our homes, not more than three minutes goes by without passing either a paan shop, a small kirana or daily provisions store, or a large supermarket. Our lives are a clutter of the small shop. We are spoilt bad. For our every need, want, desire and aspiration, there is a store close by. At arm’s-length reach. At desire’s-length reach even.
Look at it from another perspective. How many of us have a shop within us? How many of our close relatives actually run a shop, big or small? The answer is loaded. We have a shopkeeper in our family either in the first, second or third rung of relationships. The shop and its upkeep is therefore within our DNA as Indians in more ways than one. If you don’t own a shop, you possibly cater to a shop.
You sell stocks into a shop possibly through a sales and distribution business. And then there is yet another enterprise that intermediates between the manufacturer and the retailer at the street level. Informal numbers indicate the size of this business in sheer number terms to be as large as $1.3 trillion in 2022 when last audited. Finally, all of us are related to shops in some way or the other. Which one of us has survived without going out to that small little shop to buy a bar of soap, sugar or cigarette?
The shop then is the true-blue representative of early-stage small entrepreneurship. It began with a shop and in many ways it ends with a shop. All entrepreneurships are leverage-businesses to ensure the satiation of man’s want and need to buy and use. The most modern apps of today that cater to the needs of a new generation of consumers for both products and services are just this.
The shop began small, went medium-sized, went self-service, grew into a mega-mart, and then disappeared altogether to enter into those very homes that came to the shop in the days gone by through ecommerce. You don’t have to go to the shop anymore. Instead, the shop comes to you. In the bargain, instead of you stepping out to buy that loaf of bread from your corner bakery, the bread came home, driven in on an outsourced e-bike, brought in by an outsourced delivery boy and paid for on an e-payment gateway. The shop in many cases is no more. Long live the shop. The shop is on the cloud. Long live the cloud. Interestingly, this very kirana shop of yours is possibly selling more in the delivery-format than the in-shop format. Life has changed. Business has.
This nation of shopkeepers of ours is therefore best poised to do business, more than any other. Yes, we are a nation of tech people today. But that’s a total of 5.4 million people. We are a nation of doctors too, with 13.08 lakh allopathic ones registered with the National Medical Commission as on June 22. We are a nation of engineers, of teachers. But then, in sheer terms of numbers, exposure, relationships and the DNA of business intent, we are essentially a nation of shopkeepers.
The agenda of the shopkeeper is therefore the biggest agenda we need to focus on. We must plan for the future of the shopkeeper. What does the shopkeeper do next? Where is he stuck today? In the beginning he was small. Then big. And now bigger still in the virtual format. The shopkeeper reaches out to the rest of the world, which was hitherto inaccessible.Business today comes from all over. The humble Indian broomstick finds its way into Walmart across its stores in the US, just as Indian firewood finds its way into an ASDA in the UK. The most rustic offerings from India find value-added homes in the best of Western supermarkets. India is a supply waiting to feed the demand of the world. And the supply chain to facilitate this is that much more in a flux than ever before. Herein lies the story of the future, as it should unfold.
Today’s story of Indian exports into a global market is rather lopsided. If one examines Indian export earnings, we still earn from the core category of commodity, as opposed to the higher-end category of product and brand. Our top five exports are leather and its products, petroleum products, gems and jewellery, auto, equipment parts and electronic goods, and pharmaceutical products.
When the product pipeline seems to dry up, we move into services (the best being IT services of value $193 billion in 2022). The worst of the lot is the agriculture pipeline. We still do live out a life-script carved out for us by the British, as exporters of the basic commodity that markets of the West need and want.
The business of India happens not only from and through the big conglomerates and business houses that dominate our imagination by the very fact that they are in the news all the time. The business of India resides in its small towns and villages. India today boasts of a population of 63.4 million medium, small and micro enterprises. As the Union Budget 2024 just unveiled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman brings the MSME category into focus, we need to understand very simply that we are all shopkeepers. We are medium, small and micro shops. Some of our shops sell 'kirana', and some sell services such as healthcare and beauty. Some of our shops manufacture small tools that go as components in bigger manufacture. Some of us offer intermediary services in consulting, tax, audit and more. The net of it is that we are all about the shop and the shopkeeper in us.
My study of the MSME sector in India, across eight regions (concluded in March 2024) indicates just two primary gaps that keep our 63.4 million MSMEs down. The first is the fact that we have no access to the expanded markets of today. Our distribution does not tap into the e-format in B2B and B2C marketing equally, where the world is really our oyster. Our go-to market strategy thinks small, medium and micro. Never massive.
The second lag and gap is branding. We do not believe enough in it. As the world of consumption across 126 countries swears by the branded offering, we are still content being in the space that is a basic commodity.
The MSME sector in India needs to sit up and smell the opportunity. The world is indeed my oyster today. I need to invest in both the e-format of reaching out to markets as well as prudent investments into the subject of building relevant, original and innovative brands for the world at large. I am a shopkeeper for sure. I need to think like an e-shopkeeper now. I need to think like the branded shopkeeper.
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)