My five-minute cricket kit delivery in India revealed the next frontier in retail: David Richards
Last week I was in the lobby of the Taj Lands End in Bandra, Mumbai, on the Great North trade mission, meeting the founder of a fast-growing Indian company, down from Bengaluru to pitch on Shark Tank India, their Dragons’ Den.
His business is just-in-time delivery to building sites: materials in minutes.
He asked about my afternoon. The Mumbai consulate had challenged the Yorkshire delegation to cricket, and on the flight down I had sat next to Sunil Gavaskar, who spent the journey on stories about his great friend and my fellow Yorkshireman Sir Geoffrey Boycott.
I had no kit. “Use Blinkit,” the founder said.
He had been cooking the other evening, found an ingredient missing, ordered it and carried on; it arrived in five minutes. I downloaded the app, registered, and was scrolling through hundreds of tracksuits and trainers; five minutes after I ordered, a rider walked into the lobby with my gear in a brown paper bag.
I have wondered for years where the next frontier in retail would be. It was in that bag.
Blinkit does this with 2,443 dark stores, back-street warehouses no shopper enters, within a mile or two of their customers. Somebody picks the order in two and a half minutes and a scooter does the rest. Blinkit owns nine-tenths of what it sells.
Last quarter it took 331 million orders averaging 518 rupees, about £4, and kept three rupees on each one, on its own adjusted measure before depreciation and tax. That is 2p on a £4 basket, which leaves little room for a puncture.
None of it works without the riders, who are not employees. Blinkit pays them by the packet, a little more for distance and weight, and they bring the scooter; riders who have spoken to reporters put the base at 20 to 25 rupees an order, about 20p.
A courier on the British minimum wage of £12.71 doing three drops an hour costs £4.24 in wages before the bike and insurance, and that gap, twenty-odd times, is why you can have a tracksuit in five minutes in Bandra and not in Sheffield.
Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai had fewer kiranas, the corner shops, than I remembered, and NielsenIQ’s figures say why, with online now at a fifth of grocery and toiletry spending in the eight biggest cities and a quarter in Hyderabad and the south. Nobody has counted the closures properly. The lights can stay on long after the margin that fed the family has gone.
Amazon built its Indian business on big sheds and next-day delivery; Amazon Now has put close to 800 small depots into 120 cities in barely a year, the incumbent copying the model that delivered my kit, and has 6 per cent of the market by Datum’s count. Indian rules also stop a foreign-owned marketplace holding its own stock, so sellers own most of what sits in those depots; Blinkit’s parent went Indian-owned last year so that it could own what it sells.
We are getting the half-hour version through the supermarkets’ back doors. Tesco’s Whoosh grew 37 per cent in the half year and B&Q put 9,000 products on Deliveroo last week, 35 minutes to your door. What Britain does not have is the 20p drop. On British wages the basket has to be big enough to carry a £4 delivery, hence the half-hour promise, and the only way I can see to get £4 near 20p is to take the person out of it.
The robots are not there yet, as Meersbrook found when Starship’s six-wheelers trundled round it for five months before the pilot was pulled, and there is still no law here that says a pavement robot may exist.
South Yorkshire finished runners-up. I tore a calf muscle in the second game and am still limping. Maybe it would have been better if the bag had taken an hour.
David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs