Piyush Goyal has publicly expressed concern about online discounting policies ravaging small retailers. All India Mobile Retailers Association (AIMRA) has complained to large manufacturers about rampant transactional favouritism to the digital universe. Flipkart’s 2024 ‘Big Billion Day’ attracted over 33 cr user visits over just two days, while Meesho’s ‘Mega Blockbuster Sale’ recorded a 100% growth in Day 1 sales. Both brands have noted a clear increase in the demand from tier-2 and tier-3 cities, spurred by improving logistics.
Physical channels are still going strong. But, clearly, the shift towards device-to-home is irreversible, aided by a seminal shift in consumer behaviour across categories, from dining to dressing. Quickcom, reportedly growing at over 280% over the last 24 months, has led to an influx of new categories, including consumer electronics.
Indians are operating in quick-service retail mode for both greed and need, while slow shopping seems unproductive and expensive. Definitely, the transition from WeCom (community shopping experiences) to MeCom (solo plug and play) is live, with significant implications for society at large.
In the flashback WeCom era, festive-buying was a family experience, instigated by the annual bonus. The nature of shopping was more experiential, clothes and shoes merging functionality with indulgence. Such expeditions usually culminated in a prequel treat – legacy chowmein, chhole bhature, ice-cream. Most importantly, it was a bonding experience, unifying families with both gratitude and delight. Today, it’s CTC.
In the MeCom era, festivities are individualistic. According to Unicommerce data, makeup products recorded a 54% y-o-y growth, with home decor (annually $20 mn) and health and wellness products ($1.3 tn by 2024) following closely. This reveals a perennial buying pattern encouraged by the ‘auspicious’ period, as opposed to isolated celebratory purchases.As per recent RBI data, credit card usage posted 27% y-o-y growth in FY24, reaching ₹18.26 lakh cr ($219.21 bn) from nearly ₹14 lakh cr ($168.07 bn) in FY23. As of June 2024, credit card outstanding amounted to nearly ₹2.7 lakh cr, up from ₹2.6 lakh cr in March 2024, and a little over ₹2 lakh cr in March 2023. This is confirming an annualised, and not occasion-based, buying pattern, especially among millennials.The ‘Ikea effect’ efficiently captures the sociocultural gap between the WeCom and MeCom eras. It is defined as a cognitive bias that helps explain why people place higher value on things they helped to build or create – or, in this case, curate-purchase. When shopping was an inclusive family experience with ‘touch and feel’, the goodies enjoyed an emotional value beyond just achievement. Now that it’s an assembly-line approach, as routine as buying broccoli or besan, the festive psychological surplus is compromised.
Arguably, this isolationism can be telling. WHO estimates that the burden of mental health problems in India is 2,443 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per 1 lakh people. The age-adjusted suicide rate per 1 lakh people is 21.1. A small, perhaps significant, role is possibly played by the diminishing influence of community behaviour in daily and, now, even festive experiences.
Even more societally perilous is the imminent PreCom – predictive commerce – era, fuelled by prolific AI tools. In the US, Amazon had filed for a provisional patent more than 10 years ago to deliver packages to residential delivery zones before actual orders (‘anticipatory shipping’). This is the stuff of SF, instead of Philip K Dick’s ‘precrime’ in his 1956 novella The Minority Report – catching criminals before they commit a crime – here we are looking at products being sent to customers before they actually order and buy them.
One can easily imagine an AI-driven scenario where festive shopping is pre-delivered as per patterns of previous years, with returnless refunds (another Amazon innovation) thrown in as bait. LLMs ensure that sizes are adapted for youngsters demographically, and for adults, as per cross-references from health apps, etc. For those family members deceased, access to reliable mortality data should lighten the shopping bag.
In 20 years or maybe two, PreCom will become the organic successor to quickcom as the new gig on the block. This is when delirious immediacy will be ably complemented by chilling accuracy, in the game of numbers and market share. Its impact on the pleasing continuity of civilisation as we know it will be continually under the scanner, as spontaneous human engagements are superseded by aided hybrid conveniences.
As per the philosophy of Samuel P Huntington, the WeCom-MeCom-PreCom journey could be a ‘clash of civilisations’. Else, it can be viewed as per Edward W Said’s argument that this categorisation of the world’s fixed ‘civilisations’ omits the dynamic interdependence and interaction of culture.
What we clearly seek today is scalable convergence, where technology collaborates with humanity. To build a festive world order, where the principles of organic affiliation are not throttled. In the words of Swami Vivekananda, ‘the eternal values which shaped our attitude to life have been diligently preserved, practical and handed down from generation to generation’. Commerce is merely a conduit, even though a deeply influential one.