by arka bhattacharya mumbai aarif aigwan started working at the raja oil centre a kirana store in the parel area of mumbai when he was 10 years old that was forty years ago till today he goes through the same daily grind selling everyday items for a small profit he is coping with a new threat of late the emergence of etailers such as bigbasket localbanya and meragrocer means that aarif and other owners of local stores may potentially lose customers who prefer to order their months supplies online kiranas are keen to reinvent they are stepping up faster home deliveries improving facetoface customer engagement and buying retail technology where they can afford it the key to kiranas sustainability might lie in the finer aspects of their daytoday operations improving the customer experience could prove to be vital for the kiranas in their battle for survival says arvind singhal chairman of technopak advisors a management consulting firm small but significant changes could see an increase in the influx of customers these days more and more kirana stores have started improving their home delivery stores in order to keep up with the completion he adds singhal believes technology could make a differencesmall and midlevel kiranas dont have much of an idea about their customer base due to an absence of data analytics he says atul karani a shop owner says as a shopkeeper i must engage in a facetoface interaction with my customer someone who comes into my store wishing to buy a single item might peek into my shop and remember that they have to buy something else for the mid and highlevel kiranas technology has already started playing an important role digital balances for accurate weight measurement computers with inventory management software and billing systems and cctvs for monitoring purposes are just few of the ways in which kiranas have changed over the past 10 years chandrakant gala secretary bandradahisar grain merchants association believes that kiranas will survive we survived the growth of supermarket and the other modern retail chains kiranas have already upgraded to a point where a customer ordering a solitary packet of bread over the phone has it delivered to his doorstep orstep predictions of doom and gloom are farfetched as a few of the online retailers such as bigbasket have teamed up with kiranas in order to fa cilitate smoother distributionour partner kirana stores receive new business from us through express orders as well as the fee they earn for acting as order collection points says bigbasket cofounder abhinay choudhari stores also get access to our wide range and benefit from buying from a single source as they become our b2b customers and thereby they save time and resources in sourcing from multiple vendors he adds while bigbasket seems to have found an advantage in tying up with these kiranas others such as localbanya ceo karan mehrotra are apprehensive we dont envision an improvement in the delivery system in fact we see inherent challenges