AS PERSONAL service goes, few big retailers can match the tailor-made offerings of India’s 15m or so tiny, family-owned shops known as kiranas. In addition to selling all manner of goods, most are happy to cut and deliver small amounts of fresh food—1kg of onions, say—and let customers buy on credit.

随着个性化服务的发展，大型零售商很少能象印度1500万家——虽说这数字很小——家庭式小商kiranas做到定制化服务。除了售卖各种各样的商品，大多数kiranas还很乐意为消费者切菜和送数量很少的新鲜食物——如1公斤洋葱，并愿意给消费者赊账。

The steady advance of home-grown supermarket chains has so far done little to dim the kiranas’ prospects; and successive Indian governments have been reluctant to let in foreign grocers, for fear that many households would lose their livelihoods. With more than 200m Indians now able to access the internet on their mobile devices, e-commerce might appear a bigger threat. A clutch of Indian and foreign-owned online grocers has been set up in the past few years. Rather than supplying all their goods from central warehouses, however, most have struck partnerships with kiranas and other physical retailers. They employ an army of young workers to collect orders from kiranas and other local shops, and deliver them to the customer, often within the hour.

本土连锁超市的稳步发展至今没怎么影响到kiranas的发展前景；历任印度政府一直不愿意让国外商家进入印度，担心这会使很多家庭没有生计。现在有2亿印度居民可以用手机上网，电子商务可能成为一个更大的威胁。在过去向年里，涌现了众多印度和国外的网上食品杂货店。它们大多数不从中央仓库里供应所有商品，而是与kiranas以及其他实体零售店形成合作伙伴关系。它们雇佣一大批年轻人从kiranas和其他当地商店里接收订单，并将商品送到顾客受众，通常都是在一小时内送达。

Aniket Moré, aged 18, is one such worker. His employer is Grofers (as in “grocery gofers”), founded in 2013. When a customer uses the firm’s app to order, say, a cake, a bottle of Coke and bag of tomatoes, Aniket hops on his bike, collects the tomatoes from a small depot run by a contractor (this is how it ensures the quality of fresh produce), buys the Coke from a local kirana and then calls in at a nearby cake shop. He has a colleague riding pillion to help him. “The cake needs protection,” he says.

18岁的Aniket Moré就是一位快递员。他所在的公司是成立于2013年的Grofers（意为“食杂店跑腿人”）。当一个消费者从公司的应用上下订单，如一个蛋糕，一瓶可乐和一袋土豆，Aniket就跨上他的自行车，从承包商的仓库里挑选土豆（这就确保了新鲜产品的质量），从当地的kirana里买一瓶可乐，然后去一趟附近的蛋糕店买个蛋糕。他有一个同事坐在车后座上帮他忙，Aniket 说：“蛋糕需要保护好。”

Grofers also deploys a shopper at some kiranas, who is notified of orders on his smartphone. He buys the necessary items from the shopkeeper and has them ready for when the deliverer swings by. On busy days, just before the shopper runs out of cash, another company man calls at the kirana to top it up.

Grofers还给一些kiranas里安排了一个采购员。采购员在智能手机上接收订单。他会从店家那把需要的东西买好，等待送货物的人飞奔而至时交给他们。在旺季，采购员在快用完现金的时候，公司的另一个员工就会赶到那家kirana，把钱交给他们。

Grofers, and other firms trying this labour-intensive model, reckon that by linking with the myriad small shops in Indian cities, they will be spared having to spend heavily on warehousing in a country where urban land is scarce. It will also, they hope, help them to scale up fast, and make deliveries rapidly. For the big foreign firms entering the Indian market, such as Amazon, even if they do build central warehouses, it may also suit to be seen working with small local retailers rather than going all out to squash them.

Grofers与其它一些企业尝试这种劳动密集型模式，认为将印度城市里众多的小店联结起来，就不用花重金买一个仓库，因为印度的城市用地十分紧缺。他们还希望通过这种方式可以快速将扩大企业规模，让递送速度快起来。对于那些进入印度市场的外资企业来说，比如亚马逊，即使他们建了一个中央仓库，也最好是要与当地的小零售商合作，而不是尽力排挤他们。

Critics such as Arvind Singhal of Technopak, a retail consultant, argue that adding another layer to the supply chain just makes the business inefficient. Customers also need to be won round. Grofers has pulled out of nine cities, blaming “low acceptance of its service in these areas”. LocalBanya, another online grocer that sourced products from local shops, ceased operations in October. Earlier in 2015 Paytm, an Indian e-commerce firm backed by Alibaba of China, shut down a similar grocery app within two months of launch.

评论员亚维特·辛哈尔是Technopak公司的一位零售业咨询师。他认为，在供应链上多加一层只会让企业更没效率。另外，还需要说服消费者。Grofers退出了九个城市，原因是“在这些地区，Grofers服务的接受率太低”。另外一家网络食杂店Local Banya同样是从当地的商店获取产品资源，但在今年10月份倒闭了。在2015年的早些时候，阿里巴巴投资印度电商Paytm在其一个小型杂货店应用运行两个月后也下架了。

These struggles are not, so far, deterring Grofers’ bosses. They argue that a volume-driven business such as theirs takes time to build. “We are still in the habit-forming stage,” says Saurabh Kumar, one of the firm’s founders. Nor is it putting off Amazon, whose KiranaNow service has a slightly different model, letting kiranas set up virtual stalls and take orders by smartphone app, to be delivered either by the kirana’s own workers or by Amazon’s delivery service. BigBasket, currently the largest among India’s online grocers, offers two levels of service: for a household’s big monthly shop it fulfils orders from a central warehouse. But it also has tie-ups with kiranas so that consumers can order daily top-ups from them.

目前，这些挣扎没能阻止Grofers的老板们。他们认为，Grofers这种通过交易量来驱动的业务需要花费一些时间来站稳脚跟。“我们还在处在习惯形成阶段，”Grofers的其中一位创始人Saurabh Kumar说道。这些困境也阻止不了亚马逊。亚马逊的KiranaNow服务模式有稍许不同：它让kiranas创建一个虚拟摊点，通过智能手机应用来接订单，并由kiranas自己的员工或是亚马逊的派递服务送货。印度目前最大的网络食杂商之一BigBasket提供两个级别的服务：对于家庭的每月大采购，它从中央仓库发货。它还与kiranas合作，消费者就可以从kiranas购买日常用品。

None of the online grocers is yet in profit. Last month Grofers reported losses of 39m rupees ($591,000) on revenues of 7.3m rupees in its first full year of operations. Hari Menon, the boss of BigBasket, expects it to break even by 2018, on revenues of more than $1 billion. Investors so far seem patient. Grofers’ backers have provided $166m in the past two years, and BigBasket is about to close a $120m financing round with a consortium of lenders.

至今，没有一个网络食杂商有盈利。12月有报道指出，Grofers亏损了3900万卢比（约59.1万美元），而Grofers第一年全年运营收入只有730万卢比。BigBasket 的老板Hari Menon希望到2018年时能实现收支平衡，收入总量超过10亿美元。至今，投资者似乎还很有耐心。Grofers的投资人在过去的两年里提供了1.66亿美元，而BigBasket将要完成一轮1.2亿美元的联合投资人的融资。

It remains far from certain which, if any, of these attempts to bring kiranas into the age of smartphone shopping will succeed, even though India has a plentiful supply of young deliverers, like Mr Moré, prepared to work hard for modest pay. In the long term, large-scale online retailing, using central warehouses, will surely prove more efficient. Even then there is likely to be a place in Indians’ hearts, and wallets, for the local shopkeeper who knows them by name and for whom no order is too small.

还远不能确定的是，是否能有一家想要将kiranas带入一个智能手机购物的时代的企业会实现成功，虽然印度有足量的年轻小伙子可以送货，比如Moré，他努力工作只为求得一份微薄的薪资。从长远来看，大规模的网络零售业，有自己的中央仓库，肯定会更有效率。即使到那时，印度的中心地段可能会有个地方，当地店家一听到名字就知道，并且从不嫌顾客的订单小。

译者：刘惠玲, 福建师范大学外国语学院翻译硕士

审校&编辑：王旭泉

英文来源：经济学人