10 Dec
I have been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember. Maybe I started drinking at the age of three. Maybe even earlier, maybe later. But I clearly remember that back when I still had half-day school (i.e. kindergarten), after my afternoon siesta, I would sit down with my grandmother (another major coffee drinker) [...]
Posted in bangalore, food, personal, retail by: skimpy
4 Comments
29 Nov
About five years back, I spent a brief period of time working for a management consulting company. Back then, we had been told that “retail” was “big” – if not in anything else, because it was potentially going to bring a great deal of consulting business to my firm. There was a partner or two [...]
Posted in business, economics, fundaes, retail by: skimpy
No Comments
04 Oct
I’m trying to figure why that is turning out to be a big deal. Given that we have over 5 years of history of “organized retail” in India, and that it hasn’t performed particularly well on a lot of factors, I don’t know how permitting FDI in multi-brand retail is going to make a difference. [...]
Posted in business, economics, fundaes, politics, retail by: skimpy
3 Comments
19 Sep
In a little street called Narayana Pillai Street, off Commercial Street in the Shivajinagar area of Bangalore there stands a building called “Ganesh complex” which can be called a tailoring hub. There are some ten to twelve shops (forgive my arithmetic if I’ve counted too low) all of which are occupied by tailors who stitch [...]
Posted in bangalore, business, economics, retail by: skimpy
1 Comment
01 May
You know inventory represents a huge cost when online retailers such as Flipkart which don’t have to invest in keeping inventory at storefronts in expensive malls and high streets offer massive discounts, of the tune of 30 to 40% at times. You know that inventory represents a huge cost, and shop space is precious, when [...]
Posted in arbit, business, retail by: skimpy
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19 Jan
So on Sunday morning when I went to Reliance Fresh down the road I saw this guy who runs a vegetable store nearby frantically running between shelves, stocking up huge quantities of fresh vegetables. If this were a government store, and if this were license-permit raj, we could have said that this guy was hoarding [...]
Posted in business, general, retail by: skimpy
1 Comment
22 Oct
I went with the significant other last weekend while she bought shoes. And realized that the way girls buy shoes is completely different from boys’ decision process. Yeah, I know you’ll be thinking I’m just stating the obvious, and I might be doing that. And again, this post is based on two data points – [...]
Posted in arbit, business, personal, retail by: skimpy
3 Comments
26 Jul
The Barista at Barton Center on MG Road has suddenly become so much more bearable, as they have turned down the volume of their music to a level such that you can actually have conversation without shouting. On a related note, it seems much easier to find tables there compared to earlier (yesterday we walked [...]
Posted in business, economics, food, retail by: skimpy
1 Comment
15 Mar
There are very few clothing stores that I can say I’m in love with. There are very few stores where I feel like buying a large proportion of merchandise on display whenever I visit it. There are very few stores where just the atmosphere makes you buy much more than you had planned to. And [...]
Posted in bangalore, descriptive, personal, retail by: skimpy
9 Comments
08 Feb
So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a [...]
Posted in business, economics, food, fundaes, politics, randomness, retail by: skimpy
4 Comments