There is a simple and practical reason: organized retail has computerized billing and hence a 12.5% VAT. The street corner store does not give you a real bill and hence does not charge you that. So, though individual items may be cheaper by 5%, the overall cost is higher.

That is the case in Madras — not sure about Bombay.

b) the cost - while the goods themselves may have been cheaper, the tendency to buy a lot of non essential ‘pretty things’ at the mall are huge.

There’s a whole body of research that goes into placement of products and enticing consumers into buying more than what they intended to. For example, in stores in the US, the essential items (e.g. milk, bread etc.) are at the back of the store, or far away from the entrance/cashier, forcing people to walk through aisles and picking up a few more items when all they initially wanted to buy was a loaf of bread and/or milk. There are some other tricks like placing non-essential items at eye-level on a shelf where they are more likely to catch one’s eye.

What works best is making a list before going to the store, and sticking to it (more or less). And to go food/grocery shopping after having a full meal - it’s human nature to buy more than what we intended to, if we go food shopping when hungry.

I come from city of Mysore. It has been just few months since the malls started coming in. Many of my childhood friends who started small shops after there high school were doing good business. I was surprised to see how they vanished and some of them moved to work in these malls.All this in a period of 6-8 months. My mom says, it just good to go and shop with the cart. She brings stuffs that we never bought. The marketing of these shops are great.They reduce the price of non essentials and attract people to buy.I don’t remember my mom buying glass cleaning liquid in 24 years !!!!
Secondly they sell vegetables are very low prices on Tuesdays,you know why ? Because they don’t want the storage overhead on them and people take it on themselves.Besides they don’t mind paying extra 100/- for electricity.
Next the corns that flow from US.Greenpeace recently seemed to have found they are genetically modified!!!! My mom doesn’t know what genetically modified mean. Are indian malls a testing ground ?.

Amit Spot on - it is a big science - infact when the supermkt boom started the biggies like future group reliance incentivised people from the us/ uk big format stores to come over and help set up operations

Harini, if u dont mind- who is gargi? i get confused

Women and bargaining, a relationship stronger than marriage. Parleshwar temple where is it? ok i think it will be easy to find out - will visit the next time i go there.
i love the jackfruit the person sells below the stairs of the station

Hey thanks,
The Genetic modification was found in corn and corn based food products that came from US. GM was done this crops so get more ethanol. When it failed they found their way into these malls.
Ya you are right,who knows we might be already using some GM food we bought from our small shops…