A Tale of Two Brothers ...

This is a humble tale is about two brothers one grumpy and the other friendly. Both poorly educated.. Definitely they have not attended any B-Schools or got any engineering degrees.. They run the vegetable shop near my house, which I frequent. :) But wait !!. There is an interesting story yet...

The shop is located on the main road and has several competitors. It was originally started off by their father in a small wooden shed. Slowly as the boys grew up, they took over the family business. Their aim was to make it the best veggie shop on the road. Their modus operandi was as follows.

Price : They always sell their vegetables at the lowest prices on this road. There is no bargaining allowed. :)

Streamline the supplies : All veg sellers in the road got their supplies for the main City Market. The younger brother was in charge of ensuring that the freshest vegetables in the City Market were bought by him. He used persuasion and muscle power for this and personally supervised supplies. Staff were hired to unload and stock the veggies.

Quality: They always ensures that only fresh vegetables were sold and if they became stale they were immediately discounted. They had daily supplies and when the current day's supplies arrived the customer could choose from the fresh lot directly from the sacks / rather than picking from the day old stuff.

Manage stale vegetables: Stale vegetables were sold at heavily discounted prices. Since spinach has a very small shelf life, they do not stock spinach at all as they found that the cost vs return was not worth the effort.

Introduce waste disposal : They had people to continuously clean the store and remove the waste / rotten things and present a clean and smart looking ambience

Get high value customers : They managed to cater to some local restaurants on the road by tying up with them and giving them volume discounts and credit.

Modernize the shop and control pilferage : In order to get the software crowd (read: US returned) they introduced a smart ambience , departmental store like shelves with aisles to walk through and pick and choose veggies and fruits.Pilferage was controlled by introducing close circuit TV and manual monitoring.Billing machines were introduced.

Cater to the software crowd : The elder brother ensured that the shop was open from 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM to especially cater to the software crowd. Fresh supplies came only after 7:00PM. The evening crowd consists entirely of office going women (some men also :)).

Ensure efficient queue management during peak hours : During peak hours (namely after 7:00 pm) they ran two counters each managed by one brother. During off peak hours i.e. the afternoon the father who was slower was at the counter

Be one step ahead of competition : The biggest threat to these brothers came in the form of Big Bazaar, with its promise of cheap prices, which recently opened on the same road. In order to manage this they made a survey of Big Bazaar prices 1-2 times in a day and ensures that their prices were always a shade lesser than Big Bazaar prices, even if it meant that they were incurring a loss. For example if apples in BB at Rs.75 then they sold the same apples at Rs.70 and so on..

Continuously innovate and enhance : They have started stocking multiple varieties of apples / straw berries other exotic fruits and vegetables.. They also stock juices and dairy products / dry fruits and are constantly enhancing their product range

Naturally these steps paid dividends. They are the number one store on the road famous for their unbeatable combination of quality and price..

Need I say more :)