Which is the oldest profession in the world?
There is a quiet debate on this. Nevertheless, what seems to be winning is the business vertical of retail. Retail businesses, in more ways than one, have preceded all businesses. And there is a little bit of it in everything you and I do.
The business of growing and selling has been a way of life from times immemorial for the farmer. He grew, consumed his yield and sold or bartered what was in excess, often for a profit. And then came manufacturing. Out here, factories were put together to be able to sell to real customers with a demand for the product at hand. And finally came the arena of retail services, which made money for the enterprise that put it together.
Retail is therefore the biggest of all enterprises in the world. The size of global retail is estimated to be all of $25.5 trillion. India is purported to have breached the $1 trillion mark just about now and sits at $1.1 trillion. And India is slated to grow day and night, in leaps and bounds.
No wonder, then, there is big excitement brewing in the business lives of corporate organisations when it comes to retail and its many omni-channel avatars. Retail has a newfound sense of respectability even, with folks from the best B-schools vying to work within them. The image of modern retail enterprises is a newfound skin of complete respectability and added value.
The business of retail has taken centre stage today in India. We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers in many ways, with as many as 14.6 million retail outlets (if I am to include the ubiquitous and deeply distributed paan shops as well). This means that a nation of 1.36 billion people is attended to by a population of shops that is as large as the entire population of Zimbabwe. A rather super-healthy ratio of 1:93 people that outclasses the ratio of doctors to human beings in India for sure.
Retail is therefore everywhere around us. Every breath and every step you take, you have a retail interface staring at you. Retail is no longer physical alone. It surely is the Aravamudan General Stores at your street corner, but it is also Amazon.com that gets you goodies online. Retail is your local Chinese restaurant as much as it is the Swiggy and Zomato brands that bring that food right into your home. Retail is physical, digital and now even phygital, a mix of the two.
In many ways, as we look into the years ahead, retail is going to get its tentacles into literally everything there is. The petrol pump on the highway is a retail point, as is the Café Coffee Day outlet out there, or the Storage Locker guys who have recently set up shop, or for that matter even the temple and church that you pass by. Retail is this really big animal that is everywhere. And it’s getting stronger by the day. Retailers of the future will retail everything there is to sell. Real estate, cars, lottery tickets, gentlemen’s clubs, poker clubs, you name it.
Time to then expand the notion of retail altogether. Retail is the shop, retail is the delivery, retail is the experience. Businesses all across the value chain will look into retail as the one initiative that will open up markets in good times and bad. There will be retail of every type then. Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Consumer to Consumer (C2C), Machine to Consumer (M2C), Machine to Machine (M2M) and many avatars that are to yet to arrive in our lives.
Retail is therefore a solution to everything, it seems. Over the last few months of the lockdown, I have been working with folks in the space of big business and have been evangelising retail right through. Retail gets you there in the forefront of buying and selling action. You can’t stay back-end and hope for things to fall into place. Not in tough times as the ones we are living through.
Take the example of the big chain of cinema theatres. What’s ahead for them is a complete small-retail play of smaller theatres that seat all of 40 people maximum, spread out all across. Even pop-up tent theatres that seat 40 and roam into the villages of India. Like the good old days.
Take also the case of the big vineyard player struggling to make his real estate investments pay him back. Well, we now have retail vineyards of the virtual kind. You can own a fractional piece of this large vineyard. You can own 200 sq. ft. of the land and grow your grape and nurture it with care. You can watch your grapes grow through online live-streaming videos. The vineyard owner is cultivating it for you. This patch is yours. And when he sells the grape and makes the wine, you can either have bottles of your own wine delivered to you, or you can get money for the same when sold. Thousands of retail owners of this one large vineyard then.
There is little bit of retail in everything around us, and in the very air we breathe. There is aggregation of business from the small to the large in retail as we see enterprises such as Reliance Retail buying up the Future Group enterprises, and there sure is a disaggregation of retail as well, as my now-happy friend in the vineyard is monetising his passion with the grapes.
There used to be a devil in every berry of the grape (and I quote The Talmud), but now there is retail in every berry of the grape!
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder,Harish Bijoor Consults
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)