A medium sized super market with a social perspective

Maha Yogam is a relatively very small retail chain with only 5 retail stores.  It started in 2003 and over the years, has expanded into 5 locations.  The locations chosen seem to be primarily residential areas. This blog is about one of the stores located at Adambakkam.

Store Layout:

The store layout is rather one that is compact, yet composing of all the products usually available in a grocery store.

The store is arranged into 3 separate make shift rooms - each containing a particular kind of food.

As I entered the store, I faced the first room. This room contained counters and goods arranged into 2 lanes.

The room is quiet narrow and yet the alleys are wide enough for just about 2 shopping carts to pass side by side.

There are 2 lanes in the room. In the first lane there are mostly personal care products, to my left -hair oils, soaps, powders.  And to my right - nutrient supplementary, fast foods.

The second lane is primarily shampoos, toothpaste, ready-made foods, masalas, and toothpaste and bathroom accessories.

At the end of both lanes, there is entire rack containing just biscuits.

This leads neatly into the second room.

This room has various cereals, vegetable oils and spices. There is also a juices counter here.

The third room has all the essential kitchen ingredients including rice, pulses, some ready-made foods like pickles, semi ready-made foods like papas. .. Etc.

  

As most come for grocery shopping, it is a very nice strategy as one has to travel across rooms to get to pulses and rice; one has an increased chance of shopping other items.

Customer & Employee Satisfaction:

The employees (the owner has indicated a preference to less educated and unsupported women) are exceedingly friendly, and happily help with any request.  The store has saved significant money by rotating work among its employees. Most of the employees undertake various jobs at various parts of the day (depending on customer load), including helping the customers shop, arranging the products (they were proudly showcasing the neatly arranged parts of the shop); to some lesser extent even packaging some foods, bar coding all foods.

Happy employees lead to happy customers.

Every customer is greeted as they entered in.  I was able to observe, a lot of social interactions between shop keepers and customers indicating that most customers have been purchasing for a long time.

House Delivery policy:

They also feature a house delivery policy subject to a minimum of 300 Rs. and within about 1 km.

Online Shopping:

Quiet recently, this store also added an online shopping capability. For a store of such small size, to have an online shopping portal is quiet impressive. 

Returns policy:
Any food items can be returned within a day subject to showcasing of bill.

Payment modes:

The most common form of payment mode is cash. They also accept credit cards, and sudexo.  I was informed that even among purchases with bill totaling more than 1000/- Rs, roughly only half the bills were paid with cards and the rest were paid with cash.

It is surprising that the store has come such a long way considering that there were well-established stores all around it when it started. Understanding the market – need for a low margin, high volume business, a motivated workforce – through empowerment of the unsupported, creating value to the customers – by efficiency in billing processes, establishing and maintaining relationships – a very friendly workforce could be sited as reasons for the rise of a store among a lot of stores.

Learning:

1.       Significance of reachability on market share – The store emphasizes the importance of location, even in the face of competition.

2.       Significance of relationship management in establishing and maintaining a clientele – They have close relationships with the customers and most of the customers do tend to go back to the store.

3.       Significance of delivering value to customers – At the end of the day, delivering values, along with other factors, can make a store successful even in the presence of intense competition.

With an established clientele, easy accessibility, and a social perspective, Maha Yogam seems to be capable of going places.


Anandvishnu T A
FT13407