Shopping

We spent much of the next few days shopping for home décor items and other stuff for the open house.  India lacks the necessary stores, like Target, Wal-Mart, and Costco.  Somehow though, Indians manage to buy stuff.  Shopping, however, is an adventure for the non-Indian.  First, there is traffic (covered in a subsequent entry).  Once you arrive at the store and (maybe) find parking, the second part of the adventure begins.

Stores and stalls. (Photo by Thuy)

Pretty much every main street is a shopping district.  But without zoning laws, stores, businesses, and residences are crowded together.  In addition to the stores in buildings, many vendors set up stalls on the sidewalks in front of stores

Fancy stores and  not-so-fancy stores. (Photo by Thuy)

Share the road - with everything. (Photo by Thuy)

That's another thing.  In Chennai, sidewalks are something of an enigma.  They appear in front of a few stores, but suddenly end and you have to navigate the street and dodge cars, auto rickshaws, and beasts of burden to reach the next store.

Stores don't have bar codes on their merchandise.  Without bar codes, here’s how it works at Victoria Technical Institute (VTI), the Indian handicrafts store.

• You take your items to the counter
• Employee 1 (E1) reads the tag to E2, who enters the item number into the only computer in the store.
• After E2 enters all the items, she prints out a customer invoice that goes to E3, the cashier.
• You pay E3 and take your receipt to the counter, two feet from where E1 called the numbers.
• At the counter, E4 has the sales copy of the invoice and meticulously wraps your purchases in brown paper.  He is ably assisted by E5, who holds the paper straight while E4 wraps your items. If you bought a framed piece of art, E4 also wraps it in corrugated cardboard.  E4 and E5 place the items in plastic bags and staple the sales invoices to the bags.
• You present your customer invoice to E4 (or E5), who checks the sales invoice against the customer copy.  When he verifies that the invoices match, he takes a rubber stamp, pounds both copies, and hands you your invoice and purchases.
• At this point, if you have one or two bags, you take them and exit the store.  We had a whole bunch of bags and some large items, so Es 6-8 carried them to the van.

The employee:customer ratio in this store is about 4:1 (Thuy again)

In quite a few stores, the employee:customer ratio is much higher than in American stores and the employees sometimes follow you as if you were at a car dealership.  I think the fact that labor is so cheap makes these inefficiencies tolerable.  Automation, e.g. bar code scanners and computers, is prohibitively expensive for most stores.  Besides, they don't work well during a rolling blackout.

When you get home you have to unwrap everything to figure out what belongs to whom.  Then you have to re-wrap everything to pack it in the suitcases.