Visit to a Desi Retail Store - Sarvanna Stores

Though I have named it as a Desi Store, it is considered as a pioneer in retailing in the country. I had heard about it quite a long time back and wanted to visit it. Though I had been to Chennai during my sales days and had food at the Sarvanna Bhawan , but had never taken time out to visit Sarvanna Stores. The interest in the stores was further piqued by it's mention by Kishore Biyani in his book "It Happened in India" as being the role model for Big Bazaar. So this time when I was in Chennai's T Nagar market I made it a point to visit one of the stores, Sarvana Selvarathnam, which was store exclusively focused on Textiles.

It is a huge store spread over seven floors including the basement and had a mind boggling variety of stuff which was on display. The target was value-conscious consumer, infact the taxi driver who dropped us to the shop said he was planning to shop for towels to be put as seat covers on his car at the store....

The layout of the shop was very simple, so were the billing and price tags on the products , no sophisticated bar codes - the prices were hand written. I could see what inspired Biyani , the store was competing for share from the middle and lower middle income consumer, and the competition was just a few steps from the store in the form of vendors on the streets ...

Overall the visit to the T-Nagar market was a eye-opener, the mass of people moving in and out from the various traditional shops made us realize the vibrancy of traditional retail and their strong hold on traditional segments like Sarees and Jewellery. It was also the Christmas eve so the rush , but I was told that market was crowded on most of the days...