RURAL VS URBAN RETAIL TRENDS

RURAL VS URBAN RETAIL TRENDS:

India's largely rural population has also caught the eye of retailers looking for new areas of growth. ITC launched the country's first rural mall ‘ Chaupal Sagar' , offering a diverse product range from FMCG to electronics appliance to automobiles, attempting to provide farmers a one-stop destination for all of their needs. There has been yet another initiative by the DCM Sriram Group called the ‘ Hariyali Bazaar' , that has initially started off by providing farm related inputs and services but plans to introduce the complete shopping basket in due course. Other corporate bodies include Escorts, and Tata Chemicals (with Tata Kisan Sansar) setting up agri-stores to provide products/services targeted at the farmer in order to tap the vast rural market.

Commenting on the Rural Retailing chapter in INDIA RETAIL REPORT 2005, Mr. Adi B. Godrej, Chairman, The Godrej Group (India's one of the leading corporate majors) said that his group had also launched the concept of agri-stores named 'Adhaar', which served as one-stop shops for farmers selling agricultural products such as fertilisers & animal feed and also providing farmers knowledge on how to effectively utilise these products. "There are 8 stores already operating in Maharashtra and Gujarat and further expansion is very much on the cards. he added.
FDI could indeed do a lot in this sector as entry of international retailers would bring in the required expertise to set the supply chain in place which would result in elimination of wastage, better prices and quality for consumers and higher income for farmers besides of course farm produce retailing getting a facelift, said Mr. Godrej.

Tapping the fresh farm produce sector, the group plans to take its recently launched retail concept – Nature's Basket - to newer cities steadily. Godrej Group's Agro and Food division, Godrej Agrovet Ltd. (GAVL) operates the format, selling a variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs - both local and exotic thereby introducing the concept of 'farm-to-plate' to urbanites. Godrej plans to open four more Nature's Basket stores in Mumbai before taking them national. Setting up cost of a store is about INR 5-10 million and per stores sales are expected in the range of INR 30- Rs 50 million a year.

Interestingly, the world's largest corporation, Wal-mart, also had its roots in rural America. Unlike many other retailers who started from urban centres and then trickled down to rural areas, Wal-mart had started from rural areas and then came closer to cities over a period of time. Many more such concepts are likely to be tested in the future as marketers and retailers begin to acknowledge that the rural consumer is more than a ‘poor cousin' of the urban counterpart. The IMAGES KSA Report avers that these concepts are likely to go a long way in bringing a huge untapped population within the purview of organized retailing, thereby, increasing the size of the total market



The above chart makes it clearly evident why the rural retail market has been attracting the big giants to invest in it.

URBAN TRENDS :

The urban retailing has been experimenting with many formats like the supermarkets, hypermarkets, specialty stores, multi branded outlets etc. and of latest it seems to be embracing the trend of mall culture. It is a rich man's world too, with multi-screen cinemas, restaurants, games and branded shops - well out of the reach of many of the country's one billion people. But India's middle-classes, widely travelled and with deep pockets, are flocking to malls.