Category: retail

Discoverability and chaos

Last weekend (4-5 Feb) I visited Blossom Book House on Church Street (the “second branch” (above Cafe Matteo), to be precise). I bought a total of six books that day, of which four I was explicitly looking for (including two of Tufte’s books). So only two books were “discovered” in the hour or so I spent there.

This weekend (11-12 Feb) I walked a little further down Church Street (both times I had parked on Brigade Road), and with wife and daughter in tow, to Bookworm. The main reason for going to Bookworm this weekend is that daughter, based on a limited data points she has about both shops, declared that “Bookworm has a much better collection of Geronimo Stilton books, so I want to go there”.

This time there were no books I had intended to buy, but I still came back with half a dozen books for myself – all “discovered”. Daughter got a half dozen of Geronimos. I might have spent more time there and got more books for myself, except that the daughter had finished her binge in 10 minutes and was now desperate to go home and read; and the wife got bored after some 10-20 minutes of browsing and finding one book. “This place is too chaotic”, she said.

To be fair, I’ve been to Blossom many many more times than I’ve been to Bookworm (visits to the latter are still in single digits for me). Having been there so many times, the Blossom layout is incredibly familiar to me. I know  that I start with the section right in front of the billing counter that has the bestsellers. Then straight down to the publisher-wise shelves. And so on and so forth.

My pattern of browsing at Blossom has got so ritualised that I know that there are specific sections of the store where I can discover new books (being a big user of a Kindle, I don’t really fancy very old books now). And so if I discover something there, great, else my browsing very quickly comes to a halt.

At Bookworm, though, I haven’t yet figured out the patterns in terms of how they place their books. Yes, I agree with my wife that it is “more random”, but in terms of discoverability, this increased randomness is a feature for me, not a bug! Not knowing what books to expect where, I’m frequently pleasantly surprised. And that leads to more purchases.

That said, the chaos means that if I go to the bookstore with a list of things to buy, the likelihood of finding them will be very very low (that said, both shops have incredibly helpful shopkeepers who will find you any book that you want and which is in stock at the store).

Now I’m thinking about this in the context of e-commerce. If randomness is what drives discoverability, maybe one bug of e-commerce is that it is too organised. You search for something specific, and you get that. You search for something vague, and the cost of going through all the results to find something you like is very high.

As for my books, my first task is to finish most of the books I got these weekends. And I’ll continue to play it random, and patronise both these shops.

Shopping for girls

Maybe this can be my “international women’s day” post.

We went shopping yesterday, after a very long time. We had to shop for all three of us (wife, daughter and I). And we went to a few large stores in Mantri Mall and ended up shopping in the men’s section, women’s section, girls’ section and boys’ section.

You read that right. We shopped in the boys’ section. And no, we didn’t buy anything for gifting. The reason we shopped in the boys’ section was to buy our daughter nice clothes.

Last week, union minister Smriti Irani made this statement somewhere:

The problem is that even if we as parents want to be progressive and want to bring up our daughter without creating gender biases, the world conspires to reinforce gender biases into her. We find that visiting relatives and friends gift her Barbie dolls. There is “pattern recognition” from things she sees around her (last year she shocked us by saying that it was OK for a boy to hit others but not for a girl). Boys her age are not beyond making sexist comments.

But the biggest reinforcer of childhood gender norms, we’ve seen, are clothes shops, and this is a thing we’ve seen both in the UK and in India.

For some reason, clothes manufacturers have collectively decided that the only thing little girls want to wear is bling – every shirt, and skirt, and pair of shorts, and shoes, inevitably have some frills or some bling attached to them. Beyond a point, as we are shopping, it becomes unbearable to even consider such clothes. And we naturally gravitate towards the boys’ section.

Where, for whatever reason, the selection is far more palatable. No-frill (pun intended) T-shirts and comfortable trousers are conspicuous by their abundance. The design on the printed T-shirts are far better (like last year we got her a T-shirt with the nine (clearly a pre-2005 design) planets on it, which she loves wearing). Shoes are comfortable and you can actually run in them.

At pretty much any given point of time in her entire lifetime, the daughter has owned at least half a dozen pieces of clothing that have been shopped from boys’ sections of clothes shops.

There are limitations, of course – that women’s shirts have buttons on the left means that it is easy to identify “cross-dressing” when it comes to polos and button-down shirts. A lot of boys’ clothes are franchise driven, and not the sort of franchises that my wife or I would endorse (there is an overabundance of Disney stuff, such as Marvel, and not enough heavy metal).

And we were worried that once the daughter learnt to read, she would herself start objecting to wearing clothes bought from boys’ section – thankfully, until now at least, that fear hasn’t borne out. She happily selected clothes from boys’ sections yesterday, and even bought a cute T-shirt that said “King of … “.

I really don’t know when children’s clothes designers and merchandisers realise that girls want nice clothes as well – and not just frills and bling. Until then, as long as the daughter approves that is, we’ll be shopping in the boys’ section.

Signalling quality on Instagram ads

I have mentioned multiple times here before that I love Instagram advertising. I love that whatever Instagram learns from my likes (and not likes) on the platform, and through the various pixels that Facebook leaves all over the interwebs, gets used in showing me highly relevant advertising.

Rather, ever since I started using Instagram, I loved the advertising for its visual quality (that made it hard to distinguish if it was an advertisement or native content), and as things have gotten more relevant over time, I’ve started clicking through. And as I’ve started clicking occasionally, the advertising has become more relevant.

I’m sure some silicon valley marketer has some imagery about flywheels. I’m reminded of that hamster spinning this wheel when I’d gone to this animal farm near Bangalore last year.

In any case, I read this article about “the hard thing about easy things“. The basic theory, if I understand it right, is that by commoditising all the tools of production when it comes to direct to consumer selling, the business of direct to consumer selling has gotten that much harder.

The article goes on to say that unless the brand has a competitive advantage in manufacturing (or sourcing by any other means), it is pretty much impossible to make money off direct to consumer products – you struggle to repel the attack of the clones, and you have to spend increasing amounts of money on online marketing (through Google and Facebook).

While this makes sense (or not?) from an investment and entrepreneurship perspective, it got me wondering – as a consumer, how can I distinguish the quality direct to consumer products from those that have somehow simply managed to get into my feed?

Some advertising is like a peacock’s tail – it doesn’t signal any direct value about the brand being advertised. However, it signals that if the brand can afford to spend such huge amounts of money on this form of advertising, it ought to be a brand with sufficient spare cash flow that it is a good brand.

For example, when Vivo got title sponsorship of the IPL, it not only created awareness (which possibly existed thanks to its retail stores and advertising on Amazon) but also signalled that it is a “good brand” since it had bought prime advertising real estate.

Similarly, when a brand advertises on the SuperBowl, the actual dollars per eyeball may not make sense. However, when you add in the signalling value of having been there on SuperBowl (“if a brand can afford to advertise on SuperbOwl, it ought to be a good brand”), it starts making sense.

This works with a lot of mass media advertising. Front page of Times of India is premium because of peacock’s tail. Advertising in the IPL for the same reason. Perhaps similar with hoardings on the way out of airports. And booking prime time slots on popular television shows.

The problem with online advertising is that it is so targeted (and algorithmic) that this signalling effect goes away. Your instagram feed is like the Times of India where every page is similar to every other page.

From that perspective, it is hard to determine whether an advertisement represents a quality product when it appears on your Instagram timeline.

I bought Vahdam tea after someone recommended it to me on Twitter. I bought Paul and Mike’s chocolates after a friend wrote her appreciation for it on Instagram. When I started buying Blue Tokai coffee, I needed good coffee powder and was in the mood for exploration, but was helped by multiple friends and acquaintances vouching for it .

Marketing solely using digital means runs into this problem of not having the signalling effect. And that means you need to invest in “social” also, however you can imagine that to be. Then again, people have started seeing through “influencers”, like how they started seeing through “endorsements” a generation ago.

Amazon and brand-building

Sometimes shopping on Amazon feels like shopping in Burma Bazaar or National Market or any of those (literally) underground “shopping malls” where you get cheap imported stuff of uncertain quality. This is especially true when shopping for things like children’s toys and some electronics, where you don’t have too many established brands.

The only times I feel completely comfortable shopping on Amazon is when I’m buying known brands – like last month when I bought a LG monitor or Logitech keyboard and mouse. LG and Logitech have built their brands sufficiently outside of the Amazon ecosystem that I trust their quality even while buying on Amazon.

This is not the case when it comes to other categories, though. One day I was browsing for toys on Amazon and was simply unable to decide what to buy – it all looked so “cheap”. Finally, my wife noticed one brand of which we already had a toy (that we liked), and we ended up buying that (that was a sound decision). Once again, we had used our knowledge of brands that had build their brands outside of Amazon to make our decision.

The thing with Amazon is that it is an “everything store” – one store to serve all markets. That’s not how offline markets work. In offline markets, stores fairly easily differentiate themselves based on the markets that they serve – by their locations, by their price points, by the overall “look and feel” and so on. That way, when you go to a store that you know serves your segment, you can be confident that what the store sells you is what you’re looking for.

This is not the case with Amazon. Since one store serves all, it is very difficult to know upon seeing a product whether it is “made for you”. Well, Amazon has information about your previous purchases on the platform, which should give them a good idea of the “segment” you belong to, but I guess making money from advertisers on the platform trumps making your choice easier?

From this perspective, if you are a hitherto unknown brand trying to sell on Amazon, it makes sense for you to build your brand elsewhere. Here, we run into the “double cost problem” (that I had used to describe long ago why Grofers is not a sustainable business). Essentially, building a brand is expensive and once you’ve spend your dollars on (let’s say) the Facebook ecosystem to build your brand, does it make sense to also pay Amazon to push up your product when it comes to search?

It seems like brands are now choosing one way or the other. Mass market brands (it appears) are sticking to the Amazon ecosystem. Some premium brands are using Instagram to acquire customers, and then using the Shopify-Razorpay-Delhivery ecosystem to deliver. Some other premium brands are using a combination of Instagram and Amazon, but only using the latter as a fulfilment mechanism – not spending money to advertise there.

In any case, it seems to me that building brands on Amazon is not a viable business. Now I’m reminded of my other old post where I talk about how platforms are useful only if they aggregate unreliable supply. And this is a path that Amazon seems to have firmly taken.

And the moment you focus on branding, you are trying to send out the message that you are not “unreliable supply”. And this means that getting mixed up with other unreliable suppliers is not good for your business. Which is why you find that the direct to consumer brands that advertise on Instagram (have I told you I love instagram ads?) usually stay away from Amazon.

(you might think I’m going round and round in circles in this post. This is because it’s been about a month since I thought of writing this but only got down to it today. It’s also funny that I’m writing  this less than an hour after talking to someone who builds her brand on Instagram and then sells through Amazon (and offline shops) ).

PS: I got reminded of when I initially thought of this post. I bought a yoga mat from Amazon a couple of months ago. Quality turned out to be pathetic. And there was no way for me to know that when I was buying.

Omnichannel retail

About 10 days back I decided that the number of covid-19 positive cases in Bangalore was high enough to recalibrate my risk levels. So I decided I’m not going to go to “indoor shops” (where you have to step inside the shop) any more.

Instead, as much as possible I would buy from “over the counter” shops (where you don’t have to step inside). This way, I would avoid being indoors, and as long as I’m outdoors (and wearing a mask) when I’m out of homeI should be reasonably safe.

However, over the years we have come to need a lot of things that at least in an Indian context can be classified as “long tail”. Over the last three months I’ve been buying them from the large format Namdhari store close to home. Now, that’s a large airconditioned shop which my new risk levels don’t allow me to go to. So I decided to order from their website.

Now, Namdhari is a classic “omnichannel retail” (the phrase was told to me by one of the guys who helped set it up). There is no warehouse – all customer orders are fulfilled from stores. You could think of it like calling your local shop and asking for delivery.

As you can imagine, this can lead to insane inventory issues, especially for a shop like Namdhari’s that specialises in long tail stuff. It is pretty impossible for a store to reconcile how much stock is there in the store with the website (even with perfect technology, you’ll miss out on what is there in people’s (physical) charts).

There is also the issue of prioritisation of customers that they are kept in the dark about. If the shop has a limited inventory of any item (and with long tail stuff, even a small spike in demand can make inventory very limited), how does it allocate it between people who have trudged all the way to the store and those who have prepaid for it on the website?

I wasn’t that surprised, I guess, when half the items that I had ordered failed to arrive. The delivery guy told me that the rest of my money would get refunded.

I wondered why they wouldn’t try to fulfil my order the next day instead. This brings me to my next grouse – there is no real reasons sometimes to provide same day delivery. If you offer next day delivery then you know tomorrow delivery volumes beforehand, and it will be easy for you to stock up. These guys had this process, it seems, where you have to order for the same day and if the thing runs out you don’t get it at all.

In any case, three days after my half-fulfilled order had been delivered I got a mail that refund had been initiated for the items I had ordered but hadn’t arrived.

It was like writing a cheque. Cheques are inefficient because between the time it is written and encashed, neither the giver nor the receiver has access to the funds (online transfer such as IMPS, on the other hand, ensures that the money is in either the giver or receiver’s account at all points in time).

So my order which had been partially fulfilled was in a similar trishanku state – I didn’t know if it would arrive or if I should order the same items from elsewhere. In case I waited I would have the risk of getting the stuff even later (since I’d delay order from elsewhere).

It was only after it failed to arrive on Wednesday (and I got the mail) that I was able to place an order from elsewhere. Hopefully this one won’t get into trishanku state as well.

Rewarding Inefficiency

As the lockdown goes on and we have to spend tonnes of effort for things that we took for granted, there are some things I’m thankful I don’t have to spend effort for.

For example, ever since we returned to India a year ago, we’ve got milk delivered to the door every morning, and that continues. We buy our vegetables from this guy who drives a small truck in front of our road every other day (the time at which he arrives is less certain, but he maintains his thrice-a-week schedule).

For eggs, and as backup for vegetables, there is this “HOPCOMS” (a government-run fruits and vegetables shop) 100 metres from where I stay. The thing is so empty most of the time that I wonder if it would continue to exist if it had a profit motive.

It’s only for our staples, toiletries and other groceries that we have to visit organised stores, and in that too, I patronise this “independent supermarket” run by an enterprising bunch of Mallus rather than a chain. Plenty of other kinds of redundancy exists in the area where we live – there are a few family-owned grocers who don’t stock any “long tail stuff” but can supply the staples. And so forth.

This is very different from the situation in London, where I lived for two year, where for pretty much everything you go to the supermarket. If you are looking for “regular” stuff, you go to the little Tesco at the corner. If you want long tail stuff, you walk farther to the large-format Tesco. Bread, dairy, fruits and vegetables, groceries – for everything you go to Tesco. There were “unbranded” retail stores around as well (“off-licenses”, I think, they were called), but pretty much nobody ever went there.

It is the time of crisis when you start appreciating redundancy and inefficiency. All the “local supply chains” that we’ve relied upon continue to be reliable (the only exception being bread – all local bakeries are shut). It’s only for staples and toiletries that one needs to go to the supermarket.

Actually, not really, unless you are looking for long tail stuff. On my way back from the supermarket last Wednesday, I drove past one of the small family-owned groceries around here. There was a line one person long there. In other words, being a rather “inefficient” system around here, redundancy exists, and it is invaluable at crisis time.

Contrast this to a place like London, or even Gurgaon (or Gurgaon-like localities in other cities in India), where most shopping is done in branded chain stores. In that kind of scenario, at the time of crisis, there is no way out. The overoptimised and stretched (but “efficient”) supply chains mean that things come to a halt. You have no option but to regularly go to the supermarket and line up, and hope that their supply doesn’t run out.

My shopping habits apart, the larger question I’m wondering about is – once the crisis is over, how do we incentivise inefficiency? Clearly there are benefits to come out of inefficiency, in terms of slack in the system and greater resilience at the time of stress. However, these benefits are seldom seen in normal times, thanks to which businesses that push tail risks under the carpet can deliver super-normal returns and drive the more careful ones out of business.

We don’t know when the next such crisis will hit. It is highly likely that the next crisis will be nothing like this crisis, and we have no clue what it will be like. So how can we be prepared and have enough inefficiency in the system that when it comes around we are resilient?

Right now I have no answers.

The Cost of Customer Acquisition

A couple of days after I abused Cred on twitter for having “mostly useless” rewards and switched to paying my credit card bills using BBPS, I decided to see if I could make use of whatever points I have on Cred.

I saw that they had some offers on the Olive group of restaurants. Paying “5000 cred coins” ( I don’t even know how many I have, and don’t care since I’m exiting the app) would entitle me to a 20% discount on some of the Olive group restaurants (Olive Bar, SodaBottleOpenerWala, Cantan, etc.).

I happened to casually mention this to the wife, and she immediately suggested that we go to Olive Bar for dinner last night. And so we did, and had an amazing dinner, funded partly by the discount coupon from Cred’s app.

This got me thinking – why has a premium restaurant brand like Olive partnered with Cred to give these discounts? For example, we had only been to Olive once before, and had become instant fans of the place. In that sense, Olive really didn’t need to entice us with discounts – the brand awareness was already in our heads.

So I initially started out thinking that at least part of the money Olive had spent in this partnership with Cred had been wasted – marketing to us who already knew (and loved) the brand.

Then again, the discount coupon had an immediate impact – without having any plans of eating out last night, the coupon immediately spurred us to go to Olive and spend some money there. So while Olive didn’t need to target us for the brand, their discount meant that they got one extra “unplanned” visit from us.

As it happened, this was on a mid-week evening, and we were the first guests in (the place opens at 7, so we had to already delay the daughter’s bedtime for this outing), so they had a low real estate cost of hosting us (the discount is applicable on all days, not just weekdays).

And by giving us excellent food once again, they have reminded us of how strong a restaurant they are, and we might increase our frequency of visits there.

OK I guess I try to over-analyse everything in life.

But then, isn’t that the whole point of this blog?

Schelling segregation on High Streets

We’ve spoken about Thomas Schelling’s segregation model here before. The basic idea is this – people move houses if not enough people like them live around them. A simple rule is – if at least 3 of your 8 neighbours around you aren’t like you, you move.

And Schelling’s insight was that even such a simple rule – that you only need more than a third of neighbours like yourself  to stay in your place, when applied system wide, can quickly result in near-complete segregation.

I had done a quick simulation of Schelling’s model a few years back, and here is a picture from that

Of late I’ve started noticing this in retail as well. The operative phrase in the previous sentence is “I’ve started noticing”, for I think there is nothing new about this phenomenon.

Essentially retail outlets want to be located close to other stores that belong to the same category, or at least the same segment. One piece of rationale here is spillovers – someone who comes to a Louis Philippe store, upon not finding what they want, might want to hop over to the Arrow store next door. And then to the Woodland store across the road to buy shoes. And so on.

When a store is located with stores selling stuff targeted at a disjoint market, this spillover is lost.

And then there is the branding issue. A store that is located along with more downmarket stores risks losing its own brand value. This is one reason you see, across time, malls becoming segmented by the kind of stores they have.

A year and half back, I’d written about how the Jayanagar Shopping Complex “died”, thanks to non-increase of rents which resulted in cheap shops taking over, resulting in all the nicer shops moving out. In that I’d written:

On the other hand, the area immediately around the now-dying shopping complex has emerged as a brilliant retail destination.

And now I see this Schelling-ian game playing out in the area around the Jayanagar Shopping Complex. This is especially visible on two roads that attract a lot of shoppers – 11th main and 30th cross (which intersect at the Cool Joint junction).

These are two roads that have historically had a lot of good branded stores, but the way they’ve developed in the last year or so is interesting.

I don’t know if it has to do with drainage works that have been taking forever, but 32nd Cross seems to be moving more and more downmarket. A Woodland’s shoe store moved out. As did a Peter England store. Shree Sagar, which once served excellent chaats, now looks desolate.

The road has instead been taken over by stores selling “export reject garments” and knock down brands. And as I’ve observed over the last few months, these kind of shops continue take over more and more of the retail space on that road. In that sense, it is surprising that a new Jockey store took over three floors of a building on that road – seems completely out of character there. I expect it to move in short order.

I must mention here that over the last few years, the supply of retail space in Jayanagar has exploded, and that has automatically meant that all kinds of brands have space to operate there. It was only natural that a process takes place where certain roads become more upmarket than others.

Nevertheless, the way 30th cross (between 10th and 11th mains) and 10th main have visibly evolved over the last year or so is rather interesting.

Instagram targeting

Instagram is really good at what I call “one dimensional psychographic targeting”.

Essentially, based on the photos and videos (more likely hashtags) that you see, spend time on, like and comment, the platform figures out some of your interests and targets at you advertisements of products that serve these interests. And instagram manages to combine this with demographic information (where you live, etc.) to target advertisements better at you.

For example, of late I’ve been looking at a lot of weightlifting stuff on Instagram – I follow most of the coaches at my gym, and a few other handles that post fitness stuff. I’ve even posted a video of myself deadlifting.

As a result, Instagram has been following me with advertisements related to fitness, and the combination with demographics means I’m being served stuff I can get in Bangalore. For example, last two days I’ve been seeing ads of my own gym (!!). There are ads for whey proteins and healthy foods of all kinds as well.

This targeting is not perfect – for the last few months, ever since I returned to India, I’ve been bombarded on Instagram with advertisements asking me to emigrate to Canada (I don’t know what makes it think I want to move abroad again given I’ve just moved back home). The seemingly un-targeted mattress advertisements are everywhere. The shirt advertisements as well (though recently I uploaded a picture of my wardrobe on Instagram).

Nevertheless, this is a massive step up from what marketers were able to do a generation ago, where they could at best target based on a demographic. Marketers might have created elaborate psychographic or behavioural profiles of their target audiences, but when it came to advertising, the media available (newspaper, television and outdoors) meant that they had to collapse it into a demographic profile.

Instagram is not perfect, though. To the best of my knowledge, it can only target me on one “psychographic dimension” (“interested in weight lifting”, “interested in coloured chinos”, “likes Bangalore”) along with a multitude of demographic dimensions (I’m sure it’s figured out my gender, age group and maybe even caste, even if it exists in some vector somewhere and no human knows these classifications).

However, when you have created elaborate psychographic profiles, collapsing them into one dimension is still a simplification process. And so you get a reasonable degree of error in targeting. So I’m wondering what can be done that can enable advertisers to target me with more specific products that I might be interested in.

Finally, really how much are the likes of Charles Tyrwhitt, and some mattress brand whose name I don’t recall, willing to pay for their campaigns, given that their untargeted campaigns have beaten the highly targeted campaigns of the fitness guys and coffee companies to reach my eyeballs?

The Indian Second Wave

Most obituaries will describe the just-deceased VG Siddhartha as a businessman, a “coffee tycoon” and as the son-in-law of a prominent politician. However, the way I see it, he was no less than a cultural icon, and with one business, dramatically changed Indian culture in two ways.

In 1996, Siddhartha started India’s first cyber cafe, which was one of the few cyber cafes that was actually a cafe. A coffee wholesale exporter, he got into the retail business with the first outlet of Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) on Bangalore’s busy Brigade Road. For fees, you could sit there to browse the internet while sipping on espresso and cappuccino, drinks hitherto unknown to Bangalore’s (already established) coffee culture.

Soon enough he was to exit the cyber side of the business, as his retail chain’s expansion focussed on coffee, and dedicated “cyber cafes” (they were still called that) that enabled people to browse the internet for a fee mushroomed across the country. Nevertheless, we should give him credit for giving birth to an idea that enabled the first generation of Indians to truly access the internet before broadband became a thing.

The first time I interacted with his business was in 1998, when I visited the aforementioned Brigade Road CCD. For a conservative 15-year-old from South Bangalore, it was a bit of a sticker shock, with espresso priced at Rs. 10 and cappuccino at Rs. 20. There were iced drinks on the menu as well, but they were more expensive.

I don’t think I quite liked the espresso (we all ordered that that day, given the prices), but it was a new experience of consuming coffee. As I grew up and came into more money I would patronise CCD much more often.

There was an outlet on the IIMB campus, and that became the default location for any campus “treats”. I clearly remember the cold drinks – tropical iceberg and cold sparkle – being priced at Rs. 32 back in 2004. Prices went up over time but these drinks remain my favourite cold drinks at CCD to this day.

Over the last 10 years, CCD has mostly served as a meeting room for me. When I moved into my current house 5 years ago, I used a CCD that was 300 metres away to entertain any visitors (this outlet closed recently, but a flyer in today’s newspaper informs me that an “experience centre” is coming up closer by).

Whenever I have had to meet someone and we’ve had to find a place to meet, by default we have looked for CCD outlets. And we continue to do so – while Starbucks and the artisanal “Aussie-style” coffee shops (such as Third Wave or Blue Tokai) might be preferable, CCD’s sheer density has meant that it is India’s default meeting room.

Sometimes we under-appreciate the impact that CCD has had in Indian culture. It was perhaps the first large chain of “neutral venues”, where people could meet and hang out for a long time without being pestered by the waiters. I mentioned that I have been using the chain as a meeting room for a few years now. While that might be its primary use, you also find college kids who have saved up a bit on their pocket money hanging out there. My first date with my wife also took place partly at a CCD.

And then there are the loos. CCD has also completely altered the face of highways in India by offering clean loos at its outlets, making it far easier for women to travel.

The chain may not be doing that well – it seems like its financial troubles led to Siddhartha killing himself. However, given that it is a publicly traded company, we can trust the market to resolve its issues so that it continues.

And even if it fails and has to shut shop in due course, what CCD has done is to show that there is a viable market in India for a coffee shop that sells decent (but not great) coffee, where people can sit around and linger and do their business, whatever that may be.

In that way, Siddhartha’s legacy will endure.