Supermarkets Make a Tryst with Record Sales on Independence Day

Top retail chains posted their highestever weekly sales in the six days to Independence Day, when heavy discount offers lured buyers to splurge on daily household products, apparels and consumer durables.

Retailers such as Future Group, Reliance Retail, Bharti Retail, RPG Group’s Spencer and K Raheja Corp’s HyperCITY — helped by active participation of several consumer product companies — offered deep discounts across product categories to push volumes at a time when consumer spending is slowing and there are fears of poor monsoon rains impacting demand.
“Consumers are looking at savings more than ever before,” said Rakesh Biyani, joint MD of the country’s largest retailer, Future Group, whose 164 Big Bazaar outlets across some 90 cities saw more than 8.1 million visitors during the week ended August 15. “We have been working to integrate our supply chain to bring down prices as far as possible.”
Several suppliers, including Coca-Cola, Britannia and Procter & Gamble, participated in special Independence week deals, helping retailers to offer higher discounts than before.
Darshana Shah, business head for marketing at HyperCITY, a hypermarket format run by Shoppers Stop, said increased vendor participation as well as entire malls going for sales helped pull in the crowds. “The sale was definitely better this year as we had stronger and bigger deals since market sentiment was soft,” she said. HyperCITY also increased its spend on marketing this year at around 2% of overall sales. During the week, Big Bazaar outlets sold more than 1.4 lakh packs of a combination of 5 kg of rice and sugar each with 5 litre of edible oil, and more than 1,500 tonnes of detergent. LED TVs, mixer-grinders and induction cookers were among the other top sellers at Big Bazaar, officials said.
Spencer’s Retail said its same-store sales increased 24% year-on-year during August 11-15, driven by beverages, health and beauty, bakery products and staples that saw over 30% sales growth. Sales of FMCG household products grew over 50% while liquor sales rose 30%, Sanjay Gupta, executive director (marketing & business development) at Spencer’s Retail, said.
Such discounting, however, reflects the escalating pressure on retailers, whose sales are slowing during non-discounted periods. “Because of the slowdown sentiment, consumers have been withholding purchases, so companies are trying to push volumes through discount seasons at retail chains,” said Mayank Shah, group product manager at Parle Products, the country’s largest biscuit maker.
But those volumes come at the cost of bottom lines, he added. Earlier this month, credit rating agency Fitch said same-store sales growth of retailers slipped across lifestyle and value-based formats in the quarter ended June, adding that it expects retailers to combat slowing sales by offering discounts.
“However, this may lead to an erosion of gross margins,” Fitch said, while revising the outlook for the Indian retail sector to negative from stable for the first half of this fiscal due to sustained decline in the discretionary spending ability. A slew of factors such as economic slowdown, deepening crisis in Europe, high food and fuel prices has impacted consumer sentiment in the country, slowing sales of everything from cars to carpets.
Some retailers use inflation as a marketing tool. A case in point is Bharti Retail’s “freedom from inflation” campaign at Easyday stores, which help people fight inflation by providing quality merchandise at low prices. Retailers such as Reliance Retail used the week to increase their customer base. Reliance introduced discount offers such as ‘double the difference’ price guarantees across various product categories.

Retail chains adopt prepaid cards to retain customers

Prepaid cards have become the latest retail tool to keep consumers hooked to brands. They offer convenience and safety, because customers don’t have to carry cash, and they often come with a variety of offers, including discounts.

Brands like Café Coffee Day, Pizza Hut, Provogue, Kaya, Fastrack, Gili and a host of others have launched prepaid cards. A prepaid card works like a debit card with a PIN number that can be redeemed at the brands’ outlets. The cards in India are based on the closed loop model — that is, they can be redeemed only at the brand’s stores. “When I have money loaded on the card, the tendency to come to the same place is higher,” says K Ramakrishnan, marketing president at Cafe Coffee Day. The brand’s card Cafe Moments, launched this month, offers a 5% bonus on cards with a value of Rs 100 to Rs 499, 7% on Rs 500 to Rs 999 and 10% on Rs 1,000 and above.

A prepaid card obviates the need to pay cash every time, and it also enables faster accumulation of bonus points or other offers. Prepaid cards in India are currently being used more as gift cards. Some brands have used it to launch a promotion or a service. What the prepaid gift card did for Kaya was to generate incremental walk-ins,” says Suvodeep Das, marketing head at Kaya Skin Clinic. In Kaya prepaid cards, currency can be reloaded in multiples of Rs 500 to up to Rs 2 lakh. Kaya sells about 250-300 gift cards a month.

Global Prepaid Exchange recently estimated that the size of the organized prepaid gift card and gift voucher market in India is Rs 2,000 crore and would grow to Rs 8,000 crore by 2015. “The acceptance of gift cards in proportion to vouchers has increased significantly,” says Pratap T P, chief marketing officer at QwikCilver Solutions, a provider of prepaid card solutions.

However, Devangshu Dutta, CEO of retail consultancy Third Eyesight, says growth in prepaid cards would be restricted by the fact that they can be used only at a particular brand’s outlets. “Also, a customer cannot claim the minimum residual value in the card. He will have to top it up to redeem it,” he says.