Shopping Elsewhere: Retail Revolutions and the Spectacle of Retail in Contemporary India

Abstract

Retail, as the last stage of the commercial exchange process that provides the interface between seller and buyer, has been changing in recent decades, especially in metropolitan India, which has attracted significant scholarly attention (Gooptu 2009). What changed perceptions about the retail revolution that has supposedly taken place was the appearance of new instantiations of consumerist spaces from shopping malls, malls and supermarkets, hypermarkets as well as online retail sites. These spaces are often characterised by a nascent corporate culture attuned to the demands of a New India, a frequently reused trope that is becoming increasingly opaque in its meaning. On the logistics side, the contemporary retail revolution in India has involved sophisticated supply chain mechanisms and vast capital in-flows needed to maintain these; yet, the effects of the retail revolution far exceed the utilitarian needs of consumption. Furthermore, the perception of a revolutionary moment has been reinforced by other attributes that have been the focus of much scholarly attention: the growing predominance of branded goods (and fixed-price systems eschewing haggling behaviour); the visual differentiation processes contrasting the glitz of the mall with the convoluted mazes of badly maintained bazaars that in turn have increasingly been rebranded as commercial counter-cultures (Holt 2002); and the comportment and appearance of the retailers themselves, now being trained in customer care and (more or less) neat uniforms, in bodily hygiene and entrepreneurial ‘spirit’. The image of the retail revolution—aside from the aforementioned capital flows and logistics—however, jars with realities of retail that frequently have as little in common with the actual practices of retail than the breezy halls of an exclusive shopping mall with the lives of its customers, let alone the retail workforce employed there.