Death of the kirana store: Will quick commerce quicken it?
kirana stores. After e-commerce, now quick commerce is eating into India's large kirana sector which comprises nearly 12 million stores, selling groceries and personal care and other items.
People are starting to shift some of their grocery shopping from local stores to quick commerce platforms such as Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto and BB Now, which are often able to offer products 10%-15% cheaper than local stores.
When time is money, especially in urban areas, people are willing to pay a little more to save on it. When quick commerce gained shape in India during the Covid pandemic, a large section of the industry had written it off. Their argument was that Indian consumers were not going to pay convenience fees, no matter what. Some even insisted that consumers would happily wait for a few hours or even a day, if that meant they would get their orders delivered free. Today, one after the other, leading FMCG companies in their 2023-24 earnings report state that quick commerce is now not just their fastest growing channel, it is what is driving their e-commerce business growth itself, ET has reported.
Eating into kirana sector
New-age logistics firm Delhivery’s chief executive Sahil Barua has told ET in an interview that quick commerce is impacting mainly kiranas or neighbourhood retail stores. «Over 95% of the market is not amenable to quick commerce…. D2C (Direct-to-consumer) sector is around 15% of ecommerce today and more than half of that is fashion…a very small part of which is on quick commerce. If you layer
