Won't small grocers exist in American villages, towns and cities?
By multisubj
@multisubj (451)
India
February 8, 2007 9:04am CST
The prospective arrival of Walmart into India is making ripples. The President of the ruling party, Congress Ms. Sonia Gandhi wrote to the PM of India to reexamine the whole issue from the point of view of the common man.
The threat perception in India is once Walmart enters, sole trader grocers (single person owned) and partnership grocers (Owned by maximum 20 persons) will close down their shutters. Only Corporate Super Markets will be in fray. Of course, the very small traders who closed their shops can become sales persons and store keepers in Walmart.
Is this perception correct? Don't small shops exist in US?
1 response
@cretsiah (19)
• Australia
19 Feb 07
im from australia, and we have a similar problem with coles and woolworths. there are still some small businesses, but they have had to rely on their old customer base, and now after 20yrs people are realising that there is no real competion, most of the smaller businesses have had to either go into specialist or niche markets, or join up with other small businesses of similar products in order to buy quantities of stocks at low enough prices to be competitive with the 2 major grocery market holders, i think at last count woolworths/safeway had a 45% share in the grocery market and coles had around 30 - 35 % market share, they basically get to set the prices on groceries like a mint produces money... We are getting severly ripped off, from what i have been able to work out my weekly shopping bill (ie what i buy every week to live on) has gone up 30% in 6 months
