After almost 15 years of giving an inferior look to its supermarket to make it resemble a marketplace, Future Group has introduced the new ‘Gen Next’ Big Bazaar set-up. This move is made by the retail baron Kishore Biyani to lure the mobile young consumers.
Besides opening these new format stores in order to test the market, Future Group will convert a few of the existing Big Bazaar stores into the Gen Next stores as well. This way, the Gen Next model stores will have the premium merchandise ranging across different categories from food to fashion in order to entice the young customers. The Future Retail is on the verge of merging the operations of 200 Big Bazaar stores along with the 216 stores of Bharti Retail that were acquired by it.
Such customers contribute to one third of the overall customer walk-ins. To be precise, the number has increased to over 225 million customers this year as compared to less than one quarter a couple of years back. In fact, the footfalls have increased by around 15 percent all over the retail chain. This is also reflecting in the numbers as well.
This is the move that is triggered by the online grocers’ who are gaining acceptance quickly among the young customers. Kishore Biyani passionately denies the same. In fact, the founder and CEO of Future Group forecasts the death of the ecommerce grocery companies in the coming years. He stated that existing online grocer players will survive and they will shut their shop one by one.
Biyani stated that the online players have to add more value and they need to reinvent their business format in order to survive. He claimed that their existing format appears difficult considering its low margin business as well as high business cost. This way, they are not to experience any prosperity in their economic activity.
