Shop without shopkeepers

In this article, Mr Atanu Biswas, Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata talks about the arrangements in shops without shopkeepers. The writer expresses his views pertaining to 'honesty' of the customers and 'trust' in the owners. He cited an example of a newspaper stand near a bus stand that remains unmanned half the time.

New Delhi: The newspaper stand near our bus stop remains unmanned half the time. Customers take newspapers from there and keep the money in an open tray placed in a corner. In response to my query, the owner told me that he gets busy in his other business, that of supplying water-jars, and there is no problem of getting the cost of newspapers in the stand even if he is not there.

Most people are certainly honest, everywhere in the world. Honesty, however, strangely gets attention every now and then. For example, along the highway of Seling, 65 kilometers from Aizawl, the local community has indigenously developed a novel kind of grassroot commerce, known as “Nghah Lou Dawr culture”, that depends on honesty. In the thatched bamboo huts that double up as unmanned shops, small signboards are hung with the names and prices of the commodities – vegetables, fruits, flowers, occasional bottles of fruit juice, small dried fish and even freshwater snails – written using charcoal or chalk, and customers simply pick up things and put the money in a container kept therein. Customers can even take changes from the box, if required. The principle of ‘trust’ simply works! The shop owners leave for their small jhum (shifting cultivation) farms and gardens, they can’t afford to spare any member to stay as the shopkeeper. Mizoram’s Nghah Lou Dawr hit the news recently, curtsey a tweet by an NGO named ‘My Home India’, and also another by Zoramthanga, the Mizoram Chief Minister, opining that it “comes handy for many sellers and buyers in maintaining safe social distancing”.

There are scattered examples of such ‘shops without shopkeepers’ elsewhere. This has also been practised by a few farmers and cultivators from Leshemi village of Nagaland. The ‘Trust Shop’ chain in Bangaluru allowed customers 24x7 access to fresh South Indian food like sachets of idli/dosa batter, wheat chapatis and Malabar parottas, with about 90% collection in some cases and about 100% on some days. During the last twenty years, an unmanned shop functions on Gandhi Jayanti every year at the Papanasam bus stand in Tamil Nadu, implemented by the Rotary Club Papanasam, where the bus stop would be converted into a temporary shop with household articles, writing materials and snacks with price tag displayed on tables, along with the cash box to drop money and take back the change. The NGO Janashakti Charitable trust, engaged in welfare activities for the differently-abled, set up such a self-service shop in Vankulathuvayal, a coastal village of Azhikode in Kerala. CCTV cameras are installed here to prevent any untoward activities there. The Government Model Senior Secondary School, Dhanas in Chandigarh, however, had no shopkeeper or CCTV camera, just a signboard that reads “Serve Yourself, Pay Honestly”, when a shop having school supplies like notebooks, pens, pencils etc. was set up.

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Japan has many such small shops without shopkeepers in its coastal villages. The shop run by Yamada family at the coastal Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, even kept a calculator to help customers to calculate the amount to be dropped in a small wooden money-box. An empty shop of this kind in the Swiss village Gimmelwald motivated hotel owner David Waterhouse to bring the concept to London – in the form of ‘The Honesty Shop’, dubbed ‘Trusty’, which was actually a double-decker bus – near the Tower of London. Most products were sold for less than £20, where stocks were taken every morning and every evening and didn’t seem to have lost anything.

Note that ‘trust’ is an important factor affecting consumer behaviour while shopping online. In contrast, the practice of unmanned shops relying on customer integrity proves that honesty pays. That’s fantastic, indeed! They might help during the age of contagion as well. The concept of an unmanned shop is, however, economically worthy, provided the loss, if any, is less than the overall profit, and simultaneously the shopkeeper has another profitable job like the Mizo jhum farmers or the newspaper-seller of my locality. In such a case, the use of CCTV cameras, as in self-service shop in Vankulathuvayal, maybe tried to allow an unmanned shop rolling.

Not all types of shops would work under such an arrangement, for sure. In medicine shops, for example, finding an item itself needs some expertise. Salesmanship is also important for selling some kinds of goods. However, even in straightforward cases like selling vegetables or grocery items, a gross culture of unmanned shops might ruin jobs of huge number of sales personnel. Apparently, it’s never easy to find alternative jobs for them. While ‘trust’ sounds attractive, it may not be desirable in shopping culture at a mass scale. The inherent trust-factor or the pseudo-trust imposed by CCTV cameras might have huge economic and social consequences, indeed!

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