Boston Days - Part 7

Is CVS a Pharmacy? A Toy Store? A Convenience Store? Yes.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Positioning” of a Retailer) 

After pondering for several minutes, reading the name printed on every miniature car, I picked up three — all American icons.

A Ford, a Chevrolet, and a DHL pickup truck that has moved American commerce and economy since 1969. Three satisfying finds.

I placed them on the counter and looked up. The backlit signage above the cashier read: CVS Pharmacy. I had just spent ten unhurried minutes choosing toy cars inside a pharmacy.

What exactly is this place? Pharmacy, convenience store, seasonal gift shop, beauty destination, or a toy aisle with a dispensing counter? Walking through CVS, the answer changes with every aisle.

CVS was born in 1963 as Consumer Value Stores in Lowell, Massachusetts. Today it operates roughly 9,000 stores across the United States, present in 3,486 cities nationwide.

Applying a Pareto lens, New York leads with 183 stores. Houston follows with 119, Los Angeles 105, Chicago 73, Philadelphia 63. Dense urban concentration — by strategy, not accident.

Each store typically occupies around 4,000 square feet in dense urban neighbourhoods. Large enough to carry pharmacy, merchandise, beauty, food, seasonal gifting, and apparently, a very respectable toy section.

For readers in India, here is essential context. Most Americans pay little or nothing at the pharmacy counter — their health insurance, managed by intermediaries called PBMs, pays instead.

PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Manager — a powerful third party sitting between insurer, drug manufacturer, and pharmacy. It determines exactly how much the pharmacy gets reimbursed for every prescription dispensed.

Reimbursement rates have fallen relentlessly for over a decade. CVS’s pharmacy segment operating margin compressed from 9.9% in 2015 to just 3.5% today, on revenues of $139.4 billion. The arithmetic is punishing.

Walgreens, CVS’s closest comparable, ran a negative 5% operating margin on US pharmacy retail before being taken private by Sycamore Partners in 2025. The industry’s economics are structurally broken.

Which brings us back to the toy cars. The prescription customer walks in, hands over their insurance card, pays a nominal copay or sometimes nothing at all, and waits.

CVS needs that customer to also pick up candy, a greeting card, or three miniature diecast cars. Front store margins are meaningfully better than anything earned from a reimbursed prescription.

The business model, stripped to its core, is converting compulsory prescription footfall into discretionary front-store revenue. It is not irrational thinking. It is, in fact, survival thinking.

Except the consumer has not fully cooperated. CVS’s front store same-store sales declined 2.1% in 2024, recovering to just 1.2% in 2025. Customers tolerate the format. They do not embrace it.

The result is a retail identity no shopper can define in one sentence. A pharmacy barely profiting from prescriptions it fills, surrounded by merchandise it hopes will subsidise the enterprise.

The DHL truck, the Ford and the Chevrolet sit on my desk here in Boston. Charming mementos of a pharmacy still searching, with some urgency, for its own positioning clarity.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.) 

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 6

The Cleaning Liquid I Couldn’t Find. And What It Said About the World’s Most Advanced Retail Market.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Indian Quick Commerce boom”)

It started with a dirty iPad keyboard.

Three weeks of intensive sessions, constant note-taking, and the kind of daily use that leaves a screen looking like it has lived a full life. I needed a cleaning liquid. A simple, everyday SKU. The kind of thing that sits on a shelf in any electronics accessories aisle back home.

I walked into the nearest neighbourhood store. The staff looked at me the way you look at someone asking for something that simply does not exist in their world.

I tried another. Same result.

I turned, predictably, to Amazon. Thursday delivery. This was Monday. Prime or no Prime, apparently, does not always mean fast.

And that is when it hit me — not as a grievance, but as a genuine retail observation.

I am sitting in the city that gave the world MIT, Harvard, the internet, and more patents than most countries have produced in their entire history. And I cannot get a bottle of screen cleaner delivered to my door before the week is out.

Back in Chennai, I would have opened Zepto. Nine minutes. Done.

That contrast stayed with me longer than it should have, because it is not actually a logistics story. It is a structural one.

India’s quick commerce — Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart — was never designed in a boardroom as a solution to affluence. 

It was built to solve a very Indian problem: the gap between what modern consumers needed and what traditional retail could deliver. Dark stores, hyperlocal networks, mobile-first consumers, and a density of demand in our cities did the rest.

America’s retail architecture was built around a different model entirely. Large-format stores. Vast parking lots. The weekly family grocery run. A suburban rhythm of shopping that was never designed for impulse or urgency at the last mile.

The demand density that makes a dark store economically viable simply does not exist the same way in Boston’s residential neighbourhoods. Labour costs and real estate economics add further complexity. 

And so, despite GoPuff and DoorDash Dash Mart and Instacart’s best efforts, quick commerce here remains fragmented, expensive, and largely confined to dense urban pockets.

Amazon is trying. Walmart GoLocal is trying. The intent is visible. The execution, at scale, is still some distance away.

I eventually found a workaround, as one always does. But the question stayed with me through the rest of the day.

India built quick commerce out of necessity. And in doing so, leapfrogged the very markets that once set the global retail agenda.

That is a sentence I would not have expected to write ten years ago. I find that I mean it rather completely.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 5

Merchandise, Memories and Monetising Legacy

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Merchandising opportunity in India”)

I wasn’t expecting a retail moment inside a Harvard Business School campus. But that’s the thing about retail — it finds you.

The COOP, run jointly by the MIT and Harvard communities, sits unobtrusively within the HBS campus. I almost walked past it. I’m glad I didn’t.

What struck me first was the depth. Not just the range of merchandise, but the depth within each category. Sizes, colours, variants — all available. Not just displayed. Actually in stock. 

Anyone who has spent years in Indian retail will know exactly why that distinction matters. Range is easy to claim. Availability is harder to deliver.

I moved through each section the way I always do in a retail format that has something to say — slowly, observantly. 

The pricing was nominal — deliberately so. This store isn’t trying to extract maximum value from a captive audience. It is serving a community. That restraint speaks to a retail philosophy I find increasingly rare, and quietly admirable.

The staff were warm and unhurried. Not trained-smile warm. Actually warm.

Before visiting, I had already browsed thecoop.com — same range, same brand identity, consistent experience across channels. I was quietly impressed. 

Right until I noticed there was no click-and-collect option for online orders. No store pick-up. In 2026. From an institution that has arguably shaped modern management thinking worldwide. I had to smile.

But that gap aside, the COOP does something far more important than sell merchandise. It monetises legacy. 

Harvard and MIT merchandise carries an aspirational weight that no marketing budget can manufacture. 

People don’t just buy a mug or a hoodie. They buy belonging. They buy aspiration. They buy a story they want to be part of.

And that’s when my mind travelled back home.

India’s IITs and IIMs command exactly that kind of emotional currency. I have met people across the country — and across the world — for whom an IIT or IIM connection is a life-defining identity. 

Alumni who wear that association with quiet, deep pride. Aspirants who dream of it. Parents who speak of it with reverence.

That is not just brand equity. That is retail gold.

And yet, what exists on the ground? 

IIM Indore has Merchand-I — sincere and meaningful, but modest in scale. IIT Madras runs a campus gift shop online. CampusMall powers online stores across several institutions. 

Third-party aggregators sell branded apparel without institutional ownership, campus presence or meaningful curation.

None of it adds up to a retail strategy.

If I were to seriously consider a start-up opportunity when I return to India, this would be the first one I’d put on the table. 

The market is real, the aspiration is built, and the white space is hiding in plain sight.

The COOP didn’t happen by accident. 

It is the result of a community deciding that its brand deserved a serious, well-executed retail expression. Someone needs to make that case to India’s premier institutions.

The brand is already built. The store is simply waiting to open.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 4

The USD 10 Airport shuttle ride. And What It Taught Me About Loyalty Tiers.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Retailer’s focus towards Consumer Loyalty”)

The airport shuttle from Boston Logan to my hotel was a shared one.

A van, rather than a cab. And at the wheel was a lady driver who, without being asked, helped me load three weeks’ worth of luggage into the back — heavy bags, packed for a long working stay — with the kind of quiet efficiency that makes you feel looked after before you’ve even sat down.

The exterior of the vehicle carried the branding of Holiday Inn — clean, recognisable, the unmistakeable IHG logo doing exactly what logos are supposed to do.

Inside, already seated, was a couple. First-time visitors to Boston, though they had lived in the US for over two and a half decades — originally from Dallas, Texas. Warm, curious, easy to talk to. We fell into conversation almost immediately.

And then came a moment of mild confusion.

The couple were headed to the Marriott. I was headed to the Holiday Inn Express, next door. The driver, to her credit, sorted it out quickly — but for a few seconds, all three of us were momentarily uncertain about the sequence of stops.

I explained to the couple that the shuttle served both hotels as part of a shared airport transfer arrangement — a practical, cost-efficient solution for properties in close proximity.

What stayed with me, though, was not the logistics. It was the pricing.

USD 10. For both.

The Marriott guests and I paid an identical flat fare, rode in the same vehicle, loaded bags in the same hold, and were dropped at adjacent lobbies within minutes of each other.

The Marriott couple had chosen premium — a globally trusted brand, a higher nightly rate, and the reasonable expectation that a more expensive stay would reflect itself in the quality of every associated touchpoint.

I had made a different, deliberate call. Value-driven. Functional. Perfectly suited to a three-week working visit for a senior leadership programme.

But the shuttle made no such distinction.

And as I dragged my bags through the Holiday Inn lobby that evening, my mind — as it almost always does — travelled home. 

To Indian retail. To our loyalty programmes. To the elaborate tier architectures we have built, named with such aspiration, and then quietly failed to bring to life on the shop floor.

Shoppers Stop’s First Citizen Club runs across five named tiers — Classic Moments, Silver Edge, Golden Glow, Platinum, and Black — each defined by escalating annual spend thresholds. Pantaloons segments its Green Card membership by spend. Lifestyle’s Inner Circle moves loyalists deliberately through Silver, Gold, and Platinum designations.

The nomenclature is aspirational. The investment in building these structures — the CRM systems, the points engines, the tier communication — is real, recurring, and significant.

And yet.

The Platinum First Citizen member frequently stands in the same billing queue as the Classic Moments enrollee. The Golden Glow loyalist receives the same carry bag, the same counter engagement, the same fifteen-second farewell as the walk-in customer who signed up at the door twenty minutes earlier.

The tier lives in the database. It rarely survives the journey to the shop floor.

The Dallas couple and I paid the same ten dollars. The shuttle, to its credit, never pretended otherwise. It was a logistics vehicle with a flat fare structure and no aspiration to be anything more.

A retail brand’s Platinum member, however, has been explicitly promised something more.

The more important question — the one that stayed with me long after I had unpacked and settled into my room — is whether our stores are actually delivering it.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 3

The Universe Has a Sense of Timing

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Power of positive manifestations”)

300 minutes. That is precisely how long the day’s sessions had run — case studies, leadership frameworks, management metrics, and the kind of deep deliberations that leave you simultaneously drained and quietly electric.

As the glass doors of the Chao Centre swung behind me, I made a deliberate choice. Not the room. Not the power nap. The campus. The Boston evening. The open sky.

My first stop was the Tata Hall — a building that carries unusual emotional weight for every Indian who walks this campus. 

Donated by the late Mr. Ratan Tata, it stands as a quiet monument to Indian generosity meeting global ambition, housed in elegant red brick and understated dignity.

Spangler came next — the social heart of HBS. Closed for the day by 5 pm, it stood still in the evening light. A banner near its entrance read: “Hard work. With humility. For humanity.” I stood there long enough to let those words do their work.

Then came Baker Library. As participants of the Executive Management Program, access is granted until 7 pm — a privilege I was not about to surrender to fatigue. I stepped inside and simply stopped moving. 

Over 700,000 volumes. Reportedly the world’s largest business library. The ceiling, the amber light, the cathedral silence — it felt less like a library and more like a place of pilgrimage.

Earlier that day, I had written to a few luminaries associated with HBS, quietly hoping for a response. 

As I walked past the Dean’s quarters in the early evening, my thoughts turned — almost involuntarily — to Prof. Nitin Nohria.

The 10th Dean of Harvard Business School. Its first Indian-American leader. And by most accounts, one of its finest.

His decade at the helm, from 2010 to 2021, was nothing short of transformational. He introduced the FIELD curriculum — a bold pedagogical shift that brought real-world, experiential learning into the HBS classroom. 

He championed the MBA Oath, calling on graduates to pledge ethical and responsible leadership — a quiet but powerful act of institutional conscience. 

He launched HBX, now HBS Online, democratising business education beyond the walls of this storied campus. He made HBS more global, more inclusive, and more honest about what the world actually needs from business leaders.

I was still thinking about him as I rounded a corner near the library.

A gentleman in a white shirt. Round glasses. Walking at an unhurried pace.

I looked. Hesitated. Walked closer.

“Prof. Nohria?”

“Yes,” he said.

I stood still for a few seconds. What had just happened?

What followed were ten of the most quietly extraordinary minutes of my professional life. He asked about me — genuinely, not perfunctorily. I told him about 25 years in Indian retail — the airport retail ecosystem I helped build at BIAL when it first opened in 2008, the hundreds of cafes I scaled across India at Cafe Coffee Day, the dealer network I doubled for Royal Enfield. 

He listened with the full attention of a man who does not perform interest; he simply has it.

We spoke about the present and the future of Indian retail. His optimism was not the polished variety one dispenses at conferences. 

It was thoughtful, specific, and warm — the perspective of a scholar who has watched markets evolve and still believes in what is coming.

I walked back to my room a different person.

The universe, it would seem, rewards those who choose the campus walk over the power nap.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.