Bangalore buying boom

Bangalore buying boom
It isn’t just malls. The retail experience in the Garden City is different from anywhere else in India, says Shrabonti Bagchi
The Telegraph

It proudly claims to be one of the biggest malls in south Asia. Spread out over 750,000 sq ft, the Garuda Mall in Bangalore isn’t making tall claims. The glittering retail palace which is being formally opened in a few weeks, has all the usual suspects from Shoppers’ Stop to Westside and more upmarket stores like Marks & Spencer and Mango. If that’s not enough to draw shopaholics and mall rats, it has a full floor selling women’s products. But the most important touch is down in the basement: a car park that can effortlessly handle 1,000 cars and 600 two-wheelers.

It’s a short walk from the Garuda giant to the one-year-old Bangalore Central, the smartly laid out offering from retail king Kishore Biyani, managing director, Pantaloon Retail. Bangalore Central has its own unique selling proposition (USP) to attract the city’s heavy-wallet middle classes: it boasts of being India’s first seamless mall. What’s that? For the uninitiated, it’s a mall without walls, like a sprawling department store with hundreds of different sections. How does that help the shopper? The idea is that shoppers can wander about freely comparing merchandise and prices before making their choice.

Yes. There’s a retail boom taking place all over India that’s dragging the Indian bazaar into the 21st century. But nowhere is the retail experience quite like Bangalore, the once-sleepy pensioners’ paradise that has become the hi-tech capital of Asia. What started out with swanky malls like Forum, has today developed into a shopping experience at par with the best of them all. Says B.G. Uday, MD, Euroamer Garuda Resorts (India), “Forget about Gurgaon. We want the Bangalore shopping experience to be more sophisticated and upmarket.”

The Bangalore shopping experience is different in more ways than one — and it’s streets ahead of any other part of urban India — including Gurgaon. This is the city that has everything from giant supermarkets to a chain of neighbourhood vegetable stores and even exclusive speciality chains. No wonder it’s become a favourite city for Biyani, who calls it ‘a hub of retail’.

OK, let’s forget about the marble-floored malls for a moment and get back to more basic stuff. What happens when it’s time to whip out the grocery list? Once again, the average middle-class Bangalorean is spoilt for choice. Do you walk into one of the 49 FoodWorlds that operate here, or just order in from the FabMall next door? Is Monday 2 Sunday your best bet or good old Nilgiris?

Stirring up the competition in this segment are the Food Bazaars being opened by Pantaloon in its usual blitzkrieg style. The company has just opened its fourth Food Bazaar in the city and says the response has been overwhelming. Says Biyani, “The opening day of our second Big Bazaar plus Food Bazaar outlet in the Banshankari area witnessed 60,000 people coming to the store.”

The scale of the Bangalore retail revolution can be gauged by the amount of space that’s been coming up. The city now has 14 malls of over 100,000 sq ft. What’s more, about six more are coming up including two giant constructions from the Sigma Group. Real estate consultants reckon that about 2.4 million sq ft of new malls are coming up in the coming year. That’s slated to climb to 3.6 million sq ft by end-2007.

Inevitably, as the new bulldozers move into action and the number of retailers zoom, the desperate attempt to find new USPs is also rising. Take, for instance, the new Eva mall on Brigade Road — probably the most famous street in Central Bangalore. What’s different about Eva? The name makes it obvious, so there are no prizes for guessing. It’s the only mall that caters exclusively to women. From Adidas Women to Levi’s Girls, they’re all here.

If its name isn’t enough to advertise what Eva is all about, there’s also the flower-painted exterior that gives the game away. While men are not exactly unwelcome, they may feel a little more uncomfortable here than they do in regular malls, but the ladies sure do love it. “Although you do get most of the brands that you get here at other malls and shopping centres, it’s the personalised attention, plus the fact that there are only ladies stores of popular brands available here that make it special,” says Paramita Mukherjee, a 30-year-old marketing executive who, like most Bangaloreans, loves her shopping.

But it’s not just a game of gimmicky USPs. In Bangalore, every commodity that can be branded and sold as part of a chain store has gone through the process. For your daily vegetables and cereals, you go to Greens and Grains — an open-air store that looks straight out of a French provincial town with wooden stalls and sloping roofs. For organic vegetables and greens, there’s Namdharis Fresh — an upmarket veggie store.

Want to buy medicines? Walk into Health and Glow or Pill and Powder — two chains selling health and beauty products. Setting up new house? The nearest Viveks or Girias will supply you all the appliances you could ever need — from chimneys and cooking ranges to the costliest refrigerators available. Need to look at all the brands of cellphones available in a particular category? Go the nearest Global Access store and update yourself. Want to pamper the wife? Head straight for the nearest Lush store that exclusively sells bath products. Branding as an exercise has been converted into an art form in this city, with even local stores — whether they sell fresh juices or yuppy clothes — moving into the chain store format.

The retail boom is also transforming the oldest shopping districts in the city. New chains like Planet M and Proline have moved in and land prices in these districts have, as a result, moved to fairly astronomical levels.

Food is obviously a key sector here, just as it is in every other part of India. According to a KSA Technopak study on retail in south India, the big-ticket growth drivers are household groceries and apparel. Grocery is the largest segment, taking up nearly 72 percent of retail consumption.

What is it about Bangalore that’s putting it in pole position in the retail world? The answers to that question are fairly obvious. The city has undergone a decade of explosive growth, fuelled almost entirely by the hi-tech revolution. Today, there are about 280,000 people employed here both in software services and the business process outsourcing industry, according to Shankar Linge Gowda, secretary, information technology, Karnataka government.

That’s a figure that has rocketed during the last few years. Back in 1997, when the software revolution was still in its infancy, about 25,000 were employed in the sector. Today, Infosys and Wipro alone have more people on their rolls. “The explosion in the number of people employed in the IT, ITES and BPO sectors has had a huge influence on changing lifestyles in the city. From retail to property prices to cost and quality of living, everything’s been affected,” says Shankar Linge Gowda.

Bear in mind that the techie crowd is cosmopolitan, comes from all parts of the country and, most importantly, has money to burn. Most are in the crucial 20-35 segment which advertisers and marketing men are so fond of. “These people have money to spend, they have travelled around the globe and have certain expectations from the buying experience that only organised retail can give them,” says Atul Mahajan, consultant, KSA Technopak.

But that’s not the only factor at work. South India and Bangalore in particular have had an organised retail tradition that stretches back a long way. While the rest of the world was still going to sabzi mandis to buy their weekly quota of vegetables, Bangaloreans would daintily trip into Nilgiris, the chain of supermarkets selling food and household products that was established as early as 1904, wheel their trolleys into the air-conditioned store and shop as the rest of the world did.

Says Mahajan, “The fact that there was already an established history of organised retail in the southern cities has encouraged the enormous growth of retail here and the greater acceptance among the consumer of retail experiments.”

Thus, the southern consumer was already used to the idea of retail chains through brands such as Nilgiris, Nallis, Viveks and V G Paneerdas (the last two sell electronic household appliances). Even in food and beverages, Bangalore was often ahead in thought and concept. Before coffeeshop chains became ubiquitous in the rest of India, Bangalore had its own Java City — a coffeeshop-cum-youth hangout that was ahead of its time and still gives the newer brands stiff competition.

What about the future? Everyone knows that India is poised for explosive growth in the retail sector. And, the experts believe that Bangalore will stay out in front. Says Garuda’s Uday, “Bangalore’s retail potential is staggering. And far from being saturated, the market is just opening up.”

Any doubts? Consider how the city’s IT sector is still booming. According to the state government, 256 new IT companies opened last year. And, there’s no sign that this is slowing down. About four IT companies are still opening every week. That means that Bangalore’s retail boom is just beginning — and everyone here can shop till they drop.

Photographs by Asif Saud

Shop talk

So you shop, do you? But do you know your supermarket from your hypermarket? A ready reckoner:

• Strip malls: A row of stores or service outlets managed as one retail entity that does not have enclosed walkways. Most have on-site parking in front. Some may have covered canopies connecting store fronts. Typically, the layout of stores are in a straight line, U or L -shaped. This kind of mall is becoming more and more popular in developed markets such as the US.

• Shopping Mall: This is a building or set of buildings that contain stores and have interconnecting walkways that make it easy for people to walk from store to store. Also called shopping centres or shopping arcades. May or may not be attached to entertainment areas such as cinema halls.

• Shopping plaza: A mercantile establishment consisting of a carefully landscaped complex of shops representing merchandisers, usually includes restaurants and a parking area. Is usually built around an open central courtyard, which differentiates it from a mall which is usually completely enclosed. You could look at it as a modern version of the traditional marketplace.

• Hypermarket: A gigantic discount retail complex that combines the features of supermarkets, department stores, and specialty stores under one roof. The result is a huge retail facility, which carries an enormous range of products under one roof, including groceries and apparel. When planned, constructed, and executed correctly, a consumer can ideally satisfy all of their routine weekly shopping needs in one trip to the hypermarket.

• Department store: A retail organisation which carries a wide range of merchandise that is organised into separate departments for the purpose of promotion, service and control.