Introduction Of Retail Industry Essay

Retail is last link in the distribution chain that adds and delivers value to the customers or end users. Retail adds value by breaking the bulk of inventory, holding the inventory, providing merchandise assortments and giving services to the customers. Retailing is a business activity or process by which an organization or individual firm or an individual adds and delivers value in the form of goods and services to the customers. Thus retail plays an important role in the flow of information, finance and goods/products or services. The flow of information and finance is backward either towards the manufacturers or suppliers while the goods and services flow is forward direction either towards the customers. In the recent years there is a huge

It contributes to about 10 percent of the GDP and accounts to 8 percent of the employment in India. The overall retail industry is growing at the rate of 12 percent per annum and it is being expected to reach US$ 1 trillion by the year 2020 from US$ 600 billion as in the year 2015 (Indian Brand Equity Foundation). The unorganised retail sector is again divided into the family owned stores and the kirana stores which is approximately more than 12 million and spreads across more than 600,000 villages and more than 5000 towns in India (Venkatesh, 2008; Halepeteet al., 2008). The family owned stores are better maintained and organised than the kirana stores. The kirana stores operates through small stalls which are either moving or fixed (small rooms) and they keep product assortments which basically are of low price and are being regularly consumed by the households (Halepeteet al., 2008; Srivastava, 2008; Sathish and Raju, 2010; Ramkrishnan, 2010). The organised retail comprises of only 6.5 percentage of the Indian retail industry. They can be classified as a franchise based, a chain based, a conventional supermarket, a food based store or hypermarket format. The Indian government liberalization policy in 1991 has encouraged and is attracting more and more multinational organization to come forth and start their retail format in India. With the increase in the consumer