Convenor shops go slump

Speeding on a highway, you spot a petrol pump. The needle on the car demands fuel. You stop, stretch yourself and buy yourself a coke. And then you pick up a pack of chips and suddenly you remember you forgot your shaving kit, so might as well buy one. All this at the filling station is not a rarity. Indeed, it is the norm. But only in the West.
Imitating the West is a norm here. With convenor shops flooded with goods of daily use plus some stacked with imported stuff mainly eatables, the trend has set in.
‘‘The response has not been very good,’’ says Anish Gupta, owner of the Indian Oil pump at Sreeniwaspuri, talking about the convenor shop. ‘‘We opened the shop under the name ‘Sainsbury’ (our brand name for the dry fruit business in Chandni Chowk) in 1999. We also had a Pool game outlet above the shop. It was doing well but Indian Oil asked us to shut it down. Since then the business at the shop too has suffered,’’ he laments. The traffic at the Ashram Chowk has also proved to be a detrimental factor in terms of good business, he says.
Although the shop is clean and air conditioning is proper and has everything like you name it and they have it sorts, yet there was not one customer during the peak evening hours when we visited it.
‘‘I have around 400-500 customers visiting the shop,’’ says Ashok Magu of Bharat Petroleum pump at Moolchand. His shop was started by Shell and was called the ‘Shell Shop’ for the first five years when opened in 1995. Today it is called ‘In and Out’ and still doing good business. How is it that the rest of the shops are doing bad and yours is a success? ‘‘People still have got to understand the concept of these shops,’’ he says, ‘‘and the display is very important and the rest of course, is pure luck.’’