What is Brick and Mortar?

What is Brick and Mortar?

Brick and Mortar is referred to the physical store location in retailing industry parlance. Retail in earlier days was used to be done via personal selling within the store and its personal attention still remains its USP; then came various one to one networks and then ecommerce wave was spread and scaled with the advent of Amazon.

As the shelf space in a store was limited, e-commerce provided an endless opportunity to the product manufacturers at a fraction of the cost thereby passing on the maximum benefit to the e-commerce company.

It boomeranged badly for the manufacturer as the e-commerce company sold the goods at extreme low prices thereby hampering the physical retailers business with unsold inventories piling up in their stores and eventually came to haunt the product manufacturers for replacement and the retailers refusing to keep those company's products again. It was quite a learning curve for most of them as they understood that the co-existence of both ecommerce and physical stores had to be there. Out of sight, out of mind was the proverb - the manufacturers learnt the hard way.

There is no single way that can grow in a retail industry as it is hyper competitive. Especially in Kirana or grocery or FMCG line of business where everyone thinks of making it easy is in for a rude shock as this field requires extreme long hours of business, huge SKU's (stock keeping units a.k.a product items), planning of inventory, warehouse, finance and timely auditing, pilferages, damage, expiry, return, cancelled orders, continuous purchasing, payments, receivables, store decor and product placements, manpower, timely delivery, accurate order taking and punching, labeling, pest control, perishability, FIFO, LIFO etc., etc. 

Newer entrants are jumping in everyday with different narratives to get the slice of their share. It gets exciting everyday. 

As Retail is the mainstay of any economy and contributes to more than 50% of almost all the economies, hence everyone wants to have a slice of it.

India is home to approximately 50 million retailers.   

The author is the Managing Director of an omni channel retailing startup lapalap.com and the views are his own.

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