A Nation of Shopkeepers

I’ve seen many a cheery store front like this one around India. But you can find this one on the internet. Like I did.

They used to call England “A Nation of Shopkeepers”. Since nobody calls it that anymore, India might want to grab the title. There are more teeny tiny shops here than a monkey’s uncle.

If you wax nostalgic about America’s Good Old Days when stores were small, had wooden floors, were owned by families and smelled more like produce than disinfectant, you will definitely wax nostalgic here.

“Six bags of Uncle Chips please.” “That will be 100 rupees.” ($1.35)

(Ever notice how wroth, skis and nostalgia seem to be the only things about which we wax?) (My 9th Grade English teacher, Mrs. Long would have liked how I made that last sentence not end in a preposition. Though, she would have given me a red mark on back-to-back parenthetical thoughts. She believed that shoving in a lot of parenthetical thoughts was bad form. This was one of the very few things she was wrong about.) (I mean about which she was wrong.) (Of course, I wouldn’t have said that to her face.) (Who you calling chicken? YOU go tell Mrs. Long she’s wrong about parenthetical thoughts and just see the kind of grade you get.) (Now where was I? Oh, yeah. I was liking parenthetical thoughts.) I think the writer who invented them should get the Nobel Prize…wait that’s not where we left off. Where the heck were we? Oh, right-right – “America’s Good Old Days”. And I was saying how they fall somewhere between America’s Cowboy Days and K-Mart’s Double Dollar Daze. (Wait a minute stupid, that’s all wrong! NOT YOU, DEAR READER!! You’re smart. This blog is what’s stupid. It doesn’t know where it left off. Totally lost.) (Gee, maybe Mrs. Long was right about too many parenthetical thoughts…oh well. Been using then willy-nilly for over 50 years. Can’t stop now.) But shoot. Now I actually have to scroll up to see the subject line (life can be so hard)… Okay, here we are…A Nation of Shopkeepers. Yep, that’s India!

If you can’t afford a brick and mortar shop, you can sell two pounds of fresh fruit for 50c and still make a profit.

One thing I’m not sure they do as well here as they do in America is scout locations. Shops in India tend to clump together by type. If you’re a hardware store, your shop is in the hardware store section of town. If you’re a grocery store, your shop is shoulder to shoulder and round the corner from all sorts of other grocery stores.

Who’d want to climb a flight of stairs for dollar-store toys? Everybody!

You’d think competitors crammed this close together would kill each other’s business but I guess if you’ve got one point three billion shoppers looking to buy whatever you’re selling, you can blow your nose on demographic efficiencies. So every sunny morning, as all the doughnut shop owners sweep their steps, they can pause and give a brotherly nod to all the other doughnut shop owners on the street.

Most shops use the same three-part marketing plan; 1) sweep your front step 2) put out a chair to sit on 3) wait for customers.

Although one I saw actually had a promotional gimmick: a goat modeling the merchandise.

I’m a mall-loving, one-stop-shopping American but I have to admit, this category clumping system has been no hardship. And the families at more than one shop know my name.

They do have mega-malls here but they’re mostly for rich guys and tourists.

Remind me to tell you about one in Bangkok.

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