Inside kirana stores, India’s ubiquitous mom-and-pop shops

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The customer’s always journeying: Retail, like life, is about the journey—the customer journey, that is. In our State of Stores report, we dive into how retailers need to use every tool in their kit (including the POS) to meet the ever-expanding expectations of today’s shoppers. Read it here.

Across neighborhoods in India, on what seems like every other block, are kirana stores.

These mom-and-pop shops stock everyday essentials like cartons of milk, bags of rice, loaves of bread, locally grown vegetables, and more. And with 12+ million kirana stores in India, these businesses are one of the most popular ways to buy groceries in the country.

• Owners often operate these stores for more than a decade, which helps build trust among local shoppers, a few of them told Retail Brew.

• That sense of loyalty can be hard to come by, so some big-name companies are working with these businesses. For example, JioMart, an Indian delivery-service giant, said last year that it would include kirana stores as franchise partners across the country, while Amazon opened its platform up to 50,000 local shops to sell their products online.

On the block: We (or, me, Jeena), recently visited a number of kirana stores in India. Take a look below.