At the outset, let me say that this is the personal complaint of a consumer. However, I’m airing it here because I believe it is also important to the future profitability of our readers’ businesses. Over the last few years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with the noise in public and commercial spaces. It may be that my sensitivity to this has increased with age, but it is a fact that noise levels have also increased dramatically in every urban public space around us. In fact, it has reached a point where I now feel that people involved in the…
Raghavendra Kamath , Business Standard 17 October 2011, Mumbai Global fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger says its newly refurbished 5,000 square feet store in Hyderabad is inspired by the brand’s first global flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Elysées store in Paris, and reflects the décor and visual merchandising of those stores. Tommy Hilfiger, owned by clothing conglomerate PVH Corp, says it is also working on such makeover plans for its other stores in the country. Currently, it has 80 stores. Just two weeks before its flagship store in Hyderabad was reopened, Tommy Hilfiger announced that…
Amazon went public in 1997, when there were a total of 50 million internet users in the world. I remember making my first purchase on Amazon in 1998, and being delighted at the experience of finding something specific, quickly and conveniently. Over the next few months, a “revolutionary” fashion site in Europe – boo.com – raised and spent more than US$ 100 million of venture funding, and heralded a world under the domination of dotcoms. A few short months later, chatting with a journalist in New Delhi, I found that India too had caught the dotcom bug. We weighed the…
Vishal Krishna, Businessworld 1 October 2011 An ineffable air of desolation and despair hangs over the Star City mall, situated on one corner of east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar Phase 1. Over three quarters of the retail space inside is empty glass-fronted shells, waiting forlornly for tenants. And by the looks of it, the wait has been on for a long, long time now. Few customers ever walk into the mall proper — and those who do, do not stay for long. A couple of liquor shops and a Café Coffee Day outlet draw much of the miniscule clientele that the…
Shailaja Sharma, Daily News & Analysis MUMBAI, 29 September 2011 High prices and economic uncertainty appear to be turning consumers stingy, if not altogether unwilling to spend. Going by sector analysts and retail companies, spending on discretionary items is definitely shrinking and even items of daily consumption aren’t quite flying off the shelves as they used to. In fact, consumers are increasingly hunting for more value for the price they pay at retail stores. All this gives reason to believe consumer spending is set to decline in the second half of this calendar year. “Commodity-led categories like soaps, detergents and…
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
