Retail in Detail: The Slides Were My Own Scars

When I built the masterclass for the Crescent School of Business, I expected to be teaching. Slide after slide, I found myself checking a deck against my own memory instead.

Take the slide on India's 87 percent unorganised market. I met that number at 19, behind a Baskin Robbins counter in Chennai. 

The slow-moving flavours were not the problem. The way we presented them was. Bundle them into a sundae and they sold. 

The kirana does this by instinct every day, matching what it stocks to who walks in. The organised sector has spent thirty years trying to learn that instinct at scale.

Then came the slide on those who succumbed, with music chains and the early supermarkets on it. I had worked in two of them. At Musicworld and Foodworld, 

India's first organised grocery chain, I saw the stores were not short of shoppers. They were short of answers. When we fixed the layout and began ordering on store-level data, private-label sales grew 150 percent in six months. Today's champions, Vishal Mega Mart and Zudio, run on private labels. 

The idea was right early. The cash and systems arrived late.

The ecosystem slide shows the mall as the landlord layer. I sat on that side of the table at Central, leasing the spaces nobody planned for: coffee, books, game zones and food courts. 

A mall is not a building. It is a tenant mix, and each wrong tenant costs the other shops their footfall. 

That is why, when I tell students that retail leasing rose 20 percent in the first half of 2026, I tell them it is the quietest vote of confidence in stores. 

Mono-brands showed me the next lesson. 

Taking Benetton in the South from one store to six meant appointing franchisees, and the truth was in who we chose, not how many. 

Levi's at 500 stores and Bata crossing 2,000 are the same story, a brand scaled by partners it trusted.

Airports and cafés then pushed the idea further. Bangalore's airport retail taught me that a passenger with time is a different customer, so we tied rents to passenger numbers. 

Opening 140 Café Coffee Day outlets, from stadiums to IITs, taught me the reverse: the same format wins or loses on its address.

My least comfortable slide is quick commerce. In 2015 I launched a hyperlocal delivery platform in Chennai promising groceries in 30 to 300 minutes. 

We were early. There was no UPI habit, no dark-store density and no investor appetite. 

When Blinkit and Zepto reached ten minutes, I knew exactly which ingredient had been missing.

Covid completed the picture at Levista Coffee. Points of sale rose from 27,000 to over 77,000 and e-commerce grew about tenfold, but only because we served the kirana and the app together. 

That is the answer to the question the students asked, why stores keep opening. 

Reliance, Lenskart, Zudio and Titan have understood what I learned at that counter: shoppers do not choose a channel. 

They choose convenience, trust and the person across the counter.

For the careers slide I had no new advice, only the old one. Start where the customer is. 

Every role I listed, from category and stores to leasing, hiring and training, begins with that. 

It is the reason my Strategy Advisory & Consulting Firm Miles2Go offers MBA students, paid internships in market research and data analytics.

India's retail story is still early. The people in that auditorium may well write the next chapter.

Should Employers Read Our Social Lives?

At Harvard Business School, a batchmate of mine shared an unusual visa experience. 

His US visa was approved but not issued. The consular officer noted that his social media handles were private and asked him to make them public during scrutiny. His Indian passport was returned immediately, and he was told to check the website in two to three days.

He walked out of the consulate and made his handles public. His visa came through within three days. I followed the same advice, and my own process was smooth.

I thought of this when I read about Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot who attacked the Indian-origin captain of the flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week and tried to seize the controls. 

The UAE has called it an attempted terrorist attack. Al-Hammami had reportedly been barred from flying with his own country's airline over extremist concerns, and his Instagram account was deleted on the day of the flight.

That raises an uncomfortable question. 

Should employers be allowed to look into the social lives of their people, especially pilots, crew and government employees who cross borders for work? The line is thin. 

How much policing is too much, and who does it?

My own approach to social media is simple. A LinkedIn connection of mine persistently posted anti-Modi content. I disconnect from people who cross the limits of decency, but never from someone merely because their political or religious views differ from mine. 

Vulgarity and hatred, however, get you removed from my list.

Can an employer apply that standard to an entire workforce? In my own organisation, people of every faith and political ideology are welcome. 

Other employers see it differently, and that is their call. But controversies like the allegations that surfaced at TCS Pune earlier this year might have been handled better with clear social media guidelines.

As EVP at one of the world's largest media organisations, I helped write such guidelines with our HR consulting partner. A breach could lead to termination. 

Employees were never told to stay silent. They could express views, follow film stars and politicians, and share posts. They simply could not turn a disagreement into an altercation or cross into extremism. It worked.

Airlines carry millions of passengers daily, who trust the airline, the crew and the pilots with their families' lives. A pilot with extremist leanings is not a private matter. It is a public safety risk.

Airlines should adopt clear social media guidelines, with transparency about what is monitored and why. Clear rules protect the honest employee as much as the passenger. 

The aim is not surveillance, but trust.

The Customer: The Purpose, Not the Interruption

I first saw this quote on the Calcutta Metro Rail Station in 2001, during those twenty-minute underground rides from Rabindra Sarovar to Park Street. Those journeys cost me INR 7 per day; the monthly pass was a lifesaver on my meagre five-figure post-MBA salary.

I was a Management Trainee at RPG Retail then, fresh off campus recruitment. I was responsible for the Operations of Asia’s largest music retail store in the day - all of 7,000 sq ft, designed by Fitch PLC and a monthly turnover of INR 60 lakhs. That’s INR 2 lakhs a day, selling cassettes worth INR 28 for Bengali music and INR 33 for Hindi. 

CDs and DVDs were just hitting the market and were priced at INR 299, restricting them for just a few hundred in the city and a few thousands in the country, perhaps. 

Retail wasn't entirely new to me — I'd worked part-time as a waiter at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream parlour in Chennai, the second outlet in India and the first in the city. 

I already understood, however faintly, the mechanics of managing customers.

Reading Gandhi's words daily only deepened what I was beginning to learn: that customers were everything. 

Back then, many shopkeepers still believed they were doing the community a service — stocking shelves at competitive prices with wafer-thin margins, almost grudgingly. The servitude was absent.

Curiously, little has changed in twenty-five years.

I'm uncertain if Gandhi's quote still adorns that metro corridor, but I notice something troubling: despite all the talk about customer experience and digital transformation, servitude has largely disappeared. 

From luxury brands to neighbourhood shops, there's an undercurrent of indifference masquerading as efficiency.

I've run retail businesses and launched startups. 

I've always tried to live this principle visibly — showing my teams that the rice and milk we buy at home exists because customers chose to give us their business yesterday. 

Without them, regardless of title or designation, there's no revenue to manage, no salary to draw.

We've certainly shifted customer focus dramatically. Technology has changed the experience. Yet we have miles to go in creating exemplary customer moments. 

The irony isn't lost on me: we've mastered the transaction but forgotten the transaction's foundation — genuine respect for the person across the counter.

Today, on Gandhi Jayanti, his words resonate as loudly as they did in 2001. Perhaps more so. Happy Birthday, Late Shri, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ji.

Hey! Ram.