Target: The New Indian Shopper

Walmart paid a staggering $16 billion to take control of India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, as it bet on the country’s growing consumption boom and estimates that consumer spending could grow to $6 trillion by 2030.

- Debabrata Das And Deepti Chaudhary

In the summer of 1993, less than a year after India’s economy opened up to the world, a little-known supermarket opened its doors at Archana shopping complex in a posh south Delhi neighbourhood. I was barely six at the time, but I still vividly remember the first time I walked through the doors of Nanz Supermarket. The store was larger than anything I had ever seen. Unlike dingy neighbourhood kirana stores, Nanz was brightly lit. THE ENTIRE SHOP FLOOR WAS seemingly endless aisles of brightly coloured packaged foods, chocolates, and cold drinks from brands, which so far, I had only seen on hoardings of international cricket matches. Sitting in a shopping trolley pushed by my father while my mother filled it up, for the first time I felt no less than our cousins from Australia who kept complaining about the lack of supermarkets when they came to India. Overnight, the most mundane activity of buying household provisions had turned into an enjoyable family outing. But Nanz Supermarket was way ahead of its time. Or perhaps it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It struggled to replace your friendly neighbourhood kirana store uncle who remembered your name. And business-wise, rental costs were back-breaking. By the end of the 1990s, Nanz—a joint venture between Germany’s Helmut Nanz, who at the time was at the helm of a $2 billion German retail chain, Don Marsh of former U.S. convenience store Village Pantry, and India’s Nanda business family, the promoters of Escorts Group—had shut shop. A revival in 2002 didn’t last long either.