Shopping in India, Part 1
Except for the up-and-coming malls, the likes of
which we talked about in the Bangalore and a few other entries, shopping in
India is largely a matter of visiting local markets with tiny shops and pretty
limited selection. In these venues, "browsing" is definitely not facilitated nor
generally practiced. But I've been noticing lately a few other types of shopping
in India that all seem to base their customer service on the same premise: high
employee-to-customer ratios.
In one of the Bangalore entries, I mentioned a
small toy store we popped into, only to encounter a virtual wall of employees
making it impossible to push one's way through the store. There are a few other
types of shopping experiences in India where this seems to be common. The first
is in jewelry stores, at least in the big chain stores--these stores have names
like House of Alukka's, Josco, and House of
Alapatt)
Jewlery shopping in India is serious business. I believe I read somewhere that India is the world's largest consumer of gold. This was evident in the jewelry showroom we visited a while back when my mom was here. She wanted some gold earrings or something, and Marion wanted to get some earrings for our friend Eliza.
We visited a big chain jewelry store called Josco. I don't know that Josco should be called a jewelry store. I am pretty sure it only sold gold jewelry, so I would be more inclined to call it a gold store. Marion should be the one writing about this, since she and my mom did all the shopping and interacting with store employees. I mostly tried to keep Luc and Claire from falling over the railing at the balcony of the second floor of the shop.
Here's what I noticed:
1) AC. Few shops in India are air conditioned. But the AC blasts away in the Josco in Trivandrum.
2) Employees. Not unlike the toy shop we went into in Bangalore, Josco had more employees than customers.
3) Tea. Part of the gold-buying experience involves being served tea.
4) Calculators. It seems any time you're in a place where the purchases entail moderately large sums of money, Indians like to pull out their calculators to punch in the numbers and show you what a great deal you're getting. This practice might also be a way of overcoming communication barriers. Indians use terms like lakhs to describe a sum 10,000. They also put commas in weird places when writing numbers (e.g., 100,000 would be written as 1,00,000).
5) Scales. At least at Josco, it seemed that jewelry was priced by weight.
On the lower level, which we were whisked past when it became clear we were shopping for earrings and not looking to make any huge purchases, was located the wedding gold. Throughout India, one sees massive billboards (or hoardings as Indians call them) with women in wedding saris wearing what looks like 4-5 kgs worth of gold. I guess the purchase of wedding gold is a huge part of the wedding experience. The other customers at Josco seemed to be mostly mothers with daughters.
The last reason for these massive gold showrooms, may have to do with the fact that some Indians keep gold in lieu of a savings account in a bank. I'm not sure if this is a holdover from the 70s and 80s when the Rupee was extremely devalued, at which time it would have made sense to hold gold which maintains a rather stable value on the world market, or if it is a practice related to some other cultural phenomenon.
Two examples of jewelry showrooms on Mahatma Gandhi Rd. in Ernakulam, Kerala
In any case, having had some bad customer service experiences, I was reflecting on what we had seen at Josco's, and wondering why it is that gold sellers seem to have caught onto the idea of customer service but other sectors of India's retail and service economy have not.
Another sector that employs some of the same "overwhelm-the-customer-with-attention" techniques is what I suppose you could call the textiles-only department store sector. In Kerala, there is a chain called Partha's. There is another, one we visited today, called Jayalakshmi. Both sell traditional Kerala clothing like dothis and saris, as well as plenty of western fashions. They also sell other textiles like linens. Upon entering Jayalakshmi, Claire and Luc were bombarded with attention from at least 8-10 of the 30 or so employees working the main floor. As Claire and Luc fought off unwanted cheek brushings and squeezes, other employees asked us what we were looking for. One cannot really browse in these types of stores, because a) an employee is always flanking you, and b) once you tell them what you are looking for, the employee becomes the expert in determining what you want.
Eventually we escaped the ground floor and made it up to the first floor. Employees must be assigned to a single floor and held there by invisible tether. I say this since none of the all-female employees jabbing their hands in Claire and Luc's faces followed us up the steps to the first floor. This would have been fine, except that it meant a whole new bevy of employees on the first floor trying to touch our children and show us exactly what we wanted. Meanwhile, other employees are rushing around with trays of water and tea. Still others are sneaking in behind customers, placing plastic stools beside them, and insisting they sit down.
Mind you, I'm not pointing out all these details in order to complain or criticize. I've long-since stopped trying to make sense of India and am trying to take it for what it is. I'm just going into these details because I am curious about the practices I'm describing.
By the time we made it out of Jayalakshmi, Claire and Luc had receive a Jayalakshmi pen on a necklace, a Jayalakshmi keychain, and their own Jayalakshmi off-gasing vinyl shopping bags.
The final type of shopping where this practice is prevalent is what I guess could be called grocery store or supermarket shopping. These are by no means supermarkets in the sense of a Ralph's (for the West Coast readers), a Kroeger's (for the mid-west readers), or a Stop 'N Shop (for the Northeast readers). We've been using a nearby store called Mithra Mega Mart. It is two floors, but each floor is maybe half the size of an entire Trader Joe's (which are small by American supermarket standards). It is only "mega" relative to the 100 square-foot shops on the smaller side streets that sell your basics, like biscuits, milk, bread, chips, and candy.
The model of markets like Mithra Mega Mart is again the "personal shopper" approach. An employee accompanies you around the store, carrying your basket for you, or pushing the miniature shopping carts/carriages that aren't much bigger than the one's U.S. supermarkets often provide for children. If you like to pause in the coffee aisle, and ponder the trade-offs between NesCafé Classic packaged in a glass jar and NesCafé Classic packaged in a bag, it can feel a little oppressive having an employee waiting for you to make a decision. Of course, this is really just an "American-in-India" neurosis. In India, everyone has time, so the hovering employee is not bothered at all by your leisurely shopping pace. But coming from a culture where a visit to the supermarket is usually a fast-paced affair, it's difficult not to feel pressured to hurry.
Ever the sociologist, I've been trying to move beyond these observations, interesting though they may be on the surface, to figure out why such differences in the shopping experience exist and what they mean. In the next entry, towards such an end, I get more analytical, and perhaps a little more emotional as well.
Jewlery shopping in India is serious business. I believe I read somewhere that India is the world's largest consumer of gold. This was evident in the jewelry showroom we visited a while back when my mom was here. She wanted some gold earrings or something, and Marion wanted to get some earrings for our friend Eliza.
We visited a big chain jewelry store called Josco. I don't know that Josco should be called a jewelry store. I am pretty sure it only sold gold jewelry, so I would be more inclined to call it a gold store. Marion should be the one writing about this, since she and my mom did all the shopping and interacting with store employees. I mostly tried to keep Luc and Claire from falling over the railing at the balcony of the second floor of the shop.
Here's what I noticed:
1) AC. Few shops in India are air conditioned. But the AC blasts away in the Josco in Trivandrum.
2) Employees. Not unlike the toy shop we went into in Bangalore, Josco had more employees than customers.
3) Tea. Part of the gold-buying experience involves being served tea.
4) Calculators. It seems any time you're in a place where the purchases entail moderately large sums of money, Indians like to pull out their calculators to punch in the numbers and show you what a great deal you're getting. This practice might also be a way of overcoming communication barriers. Indians use terms like lakhs to describe a sum 10,000. They also put commas in weird places when writing numbers (e.g., 100,000 would be written as 1,00,000).
5) Scales. At least at Josco, it seemed that jewelry was priced by weight.
On the lower level, which we were whisked past when it became clear we were shopping for earrings and not looking to make any huge purchases, was located the wedding gold. Throughout India, one sees massive billboards (or hoardings as Indians call them) with women in wedding saris wearing what looks like 4-5 kgs worth of gold. I guess the purchase of wedding gold is a huge part of the wedding experience. The other customers at Josco seemed to be mostly mothers with daughters.
The last reason for these massive gold showrooms, may have to do with the fact that some Indians keep gold in lieu of a savings account in a bank. I'm not sure if this is a holdover from the 70s and 80s when the Rupee was extremely devalued, at which time it would have made sense to hold gold which maintains a rather stable value on the world market, or if it is a practice related to some other cultural phenomenon.
Two examples of jewelry showrooms on Mahatma Gandhi Rd. in Ernakulam, Kerala
In any case, having had some bad customer service experiences, I was reflecting on what we had seen at Josco's, and wondering why it is that gold sellers seem to have caught onto the idea of customer service but other sectors of India's retail and service economy have not.
Another sector that employs some of the same "overwhelm-the-customer-with-attention" techniques is what I suppose you could call the textiles-only department store sector. In Kerala, there is a chain called Partha's. There is another, one we visited today, called Jayalakshmi. Both sell traditional Kerala clothing like dothis and saris, as well as plenty of western fashions. They also sell other textiles like linens. Upon entering Jayalakshmi, Claire and Luc were bombarded with attention from at least 8-10 of the 30 or so employees working the main floor. As Claire and Luc fought off unwanted cheek brushings and squeezes, other employees asked us what we were looking for. One cannot really browse in these types of stores, because a) an employee is always flanking you, and b) once you tell them what you are looking for, the employee becomes the expert in determining what you want.
Eventually we escaped the ground floor and made it up to the first floor. Employees must be assigned to a single floor and held there by invisible tether. I say this since none of the all-female employees jabbing their hands in Claire and Luc's faces followed us up the steps to the first floor. This would have been fine, except that it meant a whole new bevy of employees on the first floor trying to touch our children and show us exactly what we wanted. Meanwhile, other employees are rushing around with trays of water and tea. Still others are sneaking in behind customers, placing plastic stools beside them, and insisting they sit down.
Mind you, I'm not pointing out all these details in order to complain or criticize. I've long-since stopped trying to make sense of India and am trying to take it for what it is. I'm just going into these details because I am curious about the practices I'm describing.
By the time we made it out of Jayalakshmi, Claire and Luc had receive a Jayalakshmi pen on a necklace, a Jayalakshmi keychain, and their own Jayalakshmi off-gasing vinyl shopping bags.
The final type of shopping where this practice is prevalent is what I guess could be called grocery store or supermarket shopping. These are by no means supermarkets in the sense of a Ralph's (for the West Coast readers), a Kroeger's (for the mid-west readers), or a Stop 'N Shop (for the Northeast readers). We've been using a nearby store called Mithra Mega Mart. It is two floors, but each floor is maybe half the size of an entire Trader Joe's (which are small by American supermarket standards). It is only "mega" relative to the 100 square-foot shops on the smaller side streets that sell your basics, like biscuits, milk, bread, chips, and candy.
The model of markets like Mithra Mega Mart is again the "personal shopper" approach. An employee accompanies you around the store, carrying your basket for you, or pushing the miniature shopping carts/carriages that aren't much bigger than the one's U.S. supermarkets often provide for children. If you like to pause in the coffee aisle, and ponder the trade-offs between NesCafé Classic packaged in a glass jar and NesCafé Classic packaged in a bag, it can feel a little oppressive having an employee waiting for you to make a decision. Of course, this is really just an "American-in-India" neurosis. In India, everyone has time, so the hovering employee is not bothered at all by your leisurely shopping pace. But coming from a culture where a visit to the supermarket is usually a fast-paced affair, it's difficult not to feel pressured to hurry.
Ever the sociologist, I've been trying to move beyond these observations, interesting though they may be on the surface, to figure out why such differences in the shopping experience exist and what they mean. In the next entry, towards such an end, I get more analytical, and perhaps a little more emotional as well.
Posted: Tue - April 11, 2006 at 07:30 AM
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The Zavelogue chronicles the travels and travails of Stephen, Marion, Claire and Luc during our six months in India on a Fulbright.
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Published On: Jul 15, 2006 12:54 AM
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Published On: Jul 15, 2006 12:54 AM