Saturday, January 27, 2007

Retailing at first hand

One of the 'organized' retail stores near where we live is called Godrej's Nature's Basket. It opened last year here in Lokhandwala and I was eagerly anticipating doing all my shopping there. Unfortunately, it turned out to stock not the entire requirements of what one needs for a monthly grocery. They keep fruits and veggies, as their name suggests, and an odd assortment of imported products such as Kellogg cereals, Prego pasta sauce, Bertolli olive oil etc. They seem to want to focus on offering all organic products but the range is just not complete.

Their fruits and vegetables, especially the veggies, have really been improving lately, to the point that I might now do my weekly veggie shopping there, if my regular veggie chap didn't show or some other reason. What I like is that they now stock items that your (and mine too) veggie vendor will not usually have, like celery, asparagus, chives, basil, mushrooms etc.

What really bugs me about the place is their customer service, which is quite bad. Apart from the fruits and veggie section, there are no customer service people in the store at all, besides those at the cash counters. So, if you can't find something, good luck to you! Once you reach the cash counters, you'll see 95% of the time that their computers are down, so they are making manual bills.

Then, they have a habit of not returning change, which I find extremely irritating. My bill today came to Rs 218.49 and they automatically round it off to Rs 219, which is just plain wrong. Retailers just don't seem to realize how much importance customers now place on getting good customer service. It's not ok just to be 'ok', to be a successfull retailer now, you have to be excellent at least one of the key factors, such as price, variety of products, home delivery, customer service, special offers, etc. I wonder when they will understand.

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