April 28, 2020
States retailers are already restructuring with their business modus operandi, pooling resources to stay functional, focusing majorly on online sales and are even changing their attention to cater to the essential services.
Retailers at national level are in whirlpool effects to save their businesses with the going pandemic. Retailers of Telangana are a badly affected after Chief Minister K. C. Rao prolonged the lockdown in the state till May 7, leaving a space for evaluation on May 5.
A webinar hosted by the Retailers Association of India (RAI) clubbed together industry players from Telangana to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on retail businesses.
The prime concern worrying the retailers more is the future of how the industry would look like when done with lockdown and also prediction of reaction of consumer behaviour pattern that might bring about drastic change in near future.
States retailers are already restructuring with their business modus operandi, pooling resources to stay functional, focusing majorly on online sales and are even changing their attention to cater to the essential services.
New path towards purchasing:
The Director of Celekt Mobiles, Murali Retineni, having mobile store firm, said that he has been closely observing how mobile stores in China and South Korea have adapted to customer behaviour after lockdown is over. According to them, “We are planning to screen every customer. Every customer and employee must wear a mask. We have to avoid the use of paper-based finance and go digital. We are creating SOPs, dos and don’ts, a lot of customers touch the demo phones, we will ban demo phones, minimize sofa or chair at the store to avoid contamination. Every business should have long term vision, weak companies will die, and we have to come out of our comfort zones. Keeping the team motivated also is important,” he added.
The retail store has no plans to expand its stores this year. “We have to go to where the customer is. We are exploring digital options like selecting a store to buy a mobile phone using your pin code. You can either buy online and get it delivered or pay online and visit the store and have the product brought to your car,” told Retineni.
Though loss in business for several retailers means layoffs or job cuts, the Telangana-based retailers want to innovate their business models on a more refined platform. Instead of trimming their organization with job cuts, some are open to the idea of a pay cut.
For food retailers in the state, the lockdown extension has doubled grief with the CM further banning food delivery, which was the only source of income for them at this point.
Chaitanya Muppala, MD, Almond House, Hyderabad’s renowned snacks and sweets maker said that his firm had made moderation plans when COVID-19 struck. “We had a plan, we had steps that we will take…but none of our planning really helped as the way the disease panned out in India,” admitted Chaitanya. Muppala is considering a cut in staff and streamlining a few stores and added, “We moved to hyper local delivery, to gated communities. We thought it would be a way forward but there were regulatory uncertainties”.
This means that Almond House will have to stay in a state uncertainty and hinge over making certain products to stay relevant in market, since it will no longer delivering food products to its customers.
Almond House is in process to prepare Ready-to-Cook (RTC) range of food to stay present in the market. The firm has adopted a collective approach. “Our needs for collaborations arose because organic food distributors had permission to move about and make deliveries. They have access to the customer that we at this time don’t,” says Chaitanya.
Almond House is thinking of coming together with grocery stores and retail shops to keep their products at their store’ counter as paying distributors 30% to 40% revenue has become unaffordable.
Muppala stated that lack of regulatory clarity from the state government has posed the biggest issue.
“There is a lot of ambiguity in regulation. We have pivoted our product mix to cater to more essential needs of customers but blanket statements like eating dal rice at home coming from the CM, who has left it to interpretation of local authorities has not helped,” he added.
Almond House mostly has its stores in Hyderabad and at the moment is not able to open all its outlets. The stores stay open only if the police station of the respective locality allows, “and that is demotivating,” he said.