Marathon Man

Sep  01
Khush hai zamana aaj pehli taariq hai - the singer sang - then to reinforce the message he again sang - Khush hai zamaana aaj pehli taariq hai - and just when you thought that the message had got home - he again repeated - khush hai zamana aaj pehli taariq hai - and then he ran out of ideas and sang - pehli taariq hai , pehli taariq hai...
Talk was on about the Hyderabad marathon . Only on the 30th of august the Hyderabad marathon was run . When I asked my course mates about running the marathon the replies I got were :-
Banerjee - No way . I have done enough of running; there is no need to prove myself.
Sivaram - Not my cup of tea. In any case I am part of the Marshalling team on bicycles for the marathon .
Prasad. - Nannu yemaina pichha kukka karichinda? (Do  you think a mad dog bit me( that I should be running marathon?) )

Sandhya - I really have no time for running- what with my being busy at various other jobs.. otherwise I would have definitely run the race
Jagpal - Paagal hai kya? ( Short and sweet and upto the point.)
The only guy who did run was Himanshu. Since the beginning of the course in June he has been practicing hard. Cutting back on carbohydrates. not eating sweets , consciously cutting down weight, and single mindedly concentrating on the final day. He did a tremendous job and completed half marathon in about 2h 15m-30 mins ( I think) . He did well and we are all proud of this achievement of a member of ARMSASCI. He is all pumped up to do the same in the next marathon which we think will be the Boston Marathon  - for that is where he will be in the near future.He is the Marathon Man of the day. More than 4000 runners participated in the run at Hyderabad . As the people become more aware of the benefits of running I am sure that the participation will increase ten fold.  

 After the excitement of the Marathon got over we all got down to analysing the Retail markets of apparels and the electronic goods and deciding which brand was leading the market. Our effort was rewarded with appreciation by our Prof , Malini Reddy. I don't know about the other group but team Sivaram ( Apparels) went to the three retail stores that we had identified as the market leaders of the retail. The entire afternoon was devoted to this exercise. Our first stop was West side which is part of the Trent group. The location was ideal - at  the Somajiguda X roads . It had adequate parking and the parking was convenient in that it had two levels of the basement of parking. While there was not much to speak about on the window display, the interiors were another matter altogether . Right from the basement the signposting to the ground floor of the mall was well done . The store had adequate ambience and the first impression was favourable. The ground floor was dedicated to men's apparel footwear and baked goods . Almost all brands were represented. There was music in the back ground and it did not jar upon the ears. All items were within easy reach and where they were not a salesman was present to help out. In fact there was one person who stuck like a leech to us till we moved to the first floor which was devoted to the ladies garments , lingerie and home furniture. Why furniture with lady's garments was beyond us . There were billing counters on all the floors. The next floor had books - a rarity in any shop along with the stationary and toys . The store was good.

Shoppers stop had an IPad at the entrance to give feed back. But try as much as we did we could not get in to post our comments . This privilege was reserved for the first citizens or loyal shoppers. Like west side they also had basement parking but again no valet facility. We attribute this to the slack hour that we visited both the places. Shoppers stop had a larger variety of both clothes and cosmetics and watches and jewelry  - not to talk about the section devoted entirely to the infants.  But unlike west side the items were highly priced and there were no bakery products and furniture. The space was rather constricted compared to west side and the presence of salespersons was minimal. Overall the ambience was rather good and the store had something for everyone in the stipulated range. Seems that this store catered to high income group. One thing here was that there was a section for crockery and cutlery.
 We visited the Pantaloons in the evening . Since there was no let up in the traffic . The advent of Metro has affected the Pantaloon outlet the most. Whatever parking space it had earlier has
been eaten up by the road. They had valet parking.I remember earlier about five years earlier when visiting pantaloons was easy. But now it is an exercise in itself. A person who is coming from the Hyderabad side would rather visit shoppers stop than pantaloons , because of the traffic restrictions . The ambience is good the products are good and priced for the economically reasonable people but the traffic restrictions and parking space are slowly but surely killing business .


This about sums up our first unsupervised field trip to assess the retail conditions among the top three players of  fashion apparel.