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.
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.
