Blinkit and Zepto make speedy deliveries. So why are corner stores still around?

A few months ago, for instance, I visited the kirana store after a long gap because Blinkit didn’t have what I was looking for. I asked him for black rice. He had never heard of it, which surprised me because I thought anyone who owns a farm would know all kinds of grain. He told me that he had white rice, which he could paint black. It made some customers and his staff laugh.

So when I recently walked into his store again, he had this look as though I was there to settle a score, which complicated the humane nature of the question I had for him. How was he holding up in the age of quick-delivery apps like Blinkit? “Fine,” he said. “They have nothing to do with me; I’m doing great,” he said, with some defiance. Look around, he said, “there are a lot people.” That was true. But surely these apps have affected him? “A bit,” he said, “just a bit; people need to come to a store.”

Across all big cities, kirana stores have been severely affected according to several surveys that I tend to believe, even though I don’t usually take surveys very seriously. This makes sense. Food-delivery apps like Zomato may squeeze the profit margins of restaurants but they still give them business; in some cases, even making up for lower margins through extra sale volumes. But quick-delivery apps like Blinkit and Zepto do not source items from kirana stores as they have their own warehouses.

My kirana guy has survived other kirana stores that tried to compete with his, Amazon and also superstores in the neighbourhood. He says he has survived quick-delivery apps too.

In another time, his trump card would have been grocery sales on credit, but that is not a facility anyone here needs. He has used technology, though, to fight back. He has made a WhatsApp group and promised free home delivery. He is smart and runs a tight ship with his family by employing poor assistants for almost nothing. Yet, all this doesn’t explain how he has survived.

It has got nothing to do with him at all. Instead, it has something to do with the fact that people need a bit of inefficiency. It is true that they are pressed for time, yet it is also true that they have a lot of time.

People do demonstrate that they do not have the sort of time previous generations had. They don’t have time, they say, for books, newspapers, magazines, even films in theatres and one-day cricket matches. So pressed are some people for time that they watch TV at twice the speed, just to follow that silly thing called a story.

And what exactly are people doing with all the time they so save? The truth is that people of a certain class can harvest so much time that they must figure out what to do with it, even as they avoid doing what does not interest them claiming that they don’t “have time.” They are like rash drivers who get somewhere fast, only to do nothing.

The increasing efficiency of a host of things and the persistence of low wages for domestic help has given people so much time that they need to allocate a portion of this excess to do what they deem valuable. Like going to a physical store, lifting a fruit and considering it, and then a vegetable, and putting it back on the rack.

I’m not saying this is a meaningless exercise, all I am saying is it is about spending time. It was in a kirana store, watching a person gape at an apple, and then at another one, that an English expression first mystified me. ‘Like comparing apples and oranges.’ Why would a person compare an apple to another apple? It is as absurd as comparing apples and oranges. I get the spirit of the idiom, but in a kirana store, what occurs to me is that people lifting one apple and then another, as though they know what they are doing, is not about fruit discernment at all, but a certain rustic expanse of time. It is about being human in some primordial way.

There is a Tamil film in which a man runs the most famous idli shop in the region because of the way he makes the batter, with an old-fashioned pestle and all the grime. His son wants to modernize and make batter with an electric grinder, but the old man resists. I felt it was not so much about idli at all, but the old man’s fear of being a castaway in the ocean of time. Time is precious for modern people, but not like how money is precious for the poor. It is more like what money is for the rich.

The affluent old, especially, are lost in an abundance of time. They throng my kirana store. They go there, and there is a lot of lifting of apples and shaking of coconuts. They talk to the guy there. They mutter about the poor quality of something, never say a good word, as though that would not take enough time, and haggle with him for a few rupees here and there.

Once, at the VFS visa centre, I saw an old man who was baffled that his visa application process was over so fast. He looked like he was hoping it would take a few hours, like it used to at one time, and that there would be a fuss over missing documents. But it was all over quickly and he had to go back home, into the ocean of time. I even suspected that he really didn’t need a visa. He just applied because he needed something to do. It was like walking into a kirana store and lifting some apples and shaking some coconuts.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.