customer is king kong…

India is a land of plenty… plenty of people that is… my cynical argument is that that is the reason for the current economic boom and prosperity of the nation despite there being millions of people who cannot affort a basic one meal per day or a roof over their heads or even a piece of cloth to cover themselves…

Businesses in India have woken up to the sudden cash inflow… in India they see many countries – just based on the economic divide… we have people with riches competing with the richest of the world to those competing with those that are starving for basic necessities as well and millions of people at different levels in between… result – we have a market for everything… if I were to launch a simple safety pin priced at a million dollars, I would probably find a buyer, no actually, I would find many bidders for it and I could possibly sell it at 10 million… maybe more.

No this is not due to inflation… too much money chasing too few goods is not the case… yes that is there too, but it is definitely not the problem because if it were it would affect the business men as well… it is a callous attitude typically contributed by the Indian consumer himself…

If we go back to the annals of Indian history we have always had someone categorized into “traitors”… these people typically used to sell off their fellow countrymen to invaders for no better deal than what maybe they would have all had gotten had their been a united effort at nation development… but no, Indians have always thought that they were always better than fellow Indians… not that they deserve better, that they can afford better…

If a fellow Indian is getting screwed at some service offered, the first sympathy of other Indians would go to the service provider… for example, if I am in a queue for a movie ticket, the guy behind me would grumble that I am taking too much time in buying tickets rather than that the guy issuing the tickets is taking too much time to give the tickets… and the businesses make the best of it… even if they fall short on their delivery promises they would always find a buyer for their crappy service…

The finest example is the pizza delivery 30 minute promise… I have never seen deliveries happening within 30minutes… but never have I seen people getting it free… why… because we know that the guys who are gonna go hungry are not the pizza delivery guys or the pizza makers… it is the guys who ordered it… because I definitely don’t think that pizza if it were ever returned would translate into a loss for the company… because in all probability, the pizza would find a buyer among the many people who want to flaunt their buying power and are still waiting their turn outside the restaurant…

Definitely we cannot boycott the goods and services because these are bare essentials… there was a recent fwd about the real estate boom which implored all peoples to stop buying houses for a couple of years so that the builders could actually feel the impact of a joint boycott… but that mail is getting forwarded like a hot cake but in a different sense… the psyche of the guy forwarding the mail is explained using the game theory… “if I forward it to some 10 people and they boycott the buying of the flat then I would end up getting the flat cheap…” the problem with this idea is that all the people reading the forward are Indians… and hence we think alike…

Businesses no longer look at customers… they look at target segments… because things average out in a bigger population… it is a statistical funda applicable to India definitely… gone are the days when the business people used to bend backwards to treat customers as kings and that the customer is always right… wait… I don’t remember those days at all… I have only seen an attitude of “the customer is right, so what? I will find somebody else…” according to them customers are just monkeys providing amusement with their rantings… but maybe king kong would get a better response because he is a big monkey – with due respect to racism…