Regardless of what you think of this (I tend to agree with the others ITT in that the salesmen here are middlemen just barely above rent seeking), there are two important points:
1. Middlemen form a large part of India's economy, and ripping the band-aid off can send ripples through the rest of the economy (that this will be a negative isn't guaranteed, though.)
2. Continuing from 1, middlemen are also a large bloc, and just like we've seen with the farm laws a strong push from them could lead to new laws to curb Jio's power, despite Ambani's strong links to the ruling party. We've already seen similar pushes against e-com companies leading to some success.
And, if it's anything like the ones around here, by selling worse products and intentionally under-staffing their stores. Everything they sell is pre-packaged and you only interact with a human for 30 seconds at checkout (after having waited 20 minutes in line because there's only one checkout open most od the time).
They have a "cheap and efficient at all costs" attitude, with the costs being: overworked employees, terrible user experience and a whole bunch of unnecessary waste from packaging (especially with their stupid half plastic half paper bread bags that only exist to cust costs, but that a friend in the recycling industry tells me are basically unrecyclable despite both the materials being recyclable on their own).
I find the user experience amazing, it's really efficient to go through an Aldi. Check out is fast, shopping is fast due to standardized layout, not so many similar choices to overwhelm you so you don't have to decide which cherry tomato to buy etc.
Also I'm not sure where you get the unnecessary waste from packaging. They just put everything on the shopping floor as it's shipped to them. That's not extra packaging. Other stores just hide this from you.
On the half plastic half paper bags I agree, but that's the same in the other big chains in Germany, so it's at least not more wasteful than the others.
Also I've been to America, the other stores really had a lot of extra plastic packaging. Like unpeeled fruit. That's horrific.
Funny, it's the exact opposite for me. All our other stores also have their own standardised layouts and I have a far easier time remembering those than Aldi's, even though I've been to Aldis far more times that some of the other ones.
Checkout is immensely infuriating for me because it's clearly focused on getting me out of the way asap. I'll be standing in like for 10 or more minutes, then get rushed through checkout at a ridiculous speed. There's like 10cm of counter space so products start falling if I'm not putting them away fast enough. I have to put everything back in the cart and then sort things into bags to take home at the awkward shelf at the exit. It's efficient for them, but inefficient for me.
And I do actually like some choice - sometimes I want a cheap tomato because it's getting cooked or put in a salad anyways and sometimes I want the better more expensive one because it'll be used "raw" like on a sandwich.
As for packaging, I was talking about retail packaging. Like, in a regular store, even a small one, I can ask for X dag of sliced cheese and I'll get that much in a small light wrapper. In Aldi, it's pre-packaged in hard plastic of an unreasonable size and I just have to buy multiple packs if I need more cheese. Same with everything else, even some vegetables. Even cans are shrink-wrapped together sometimes! I legitimately observed my bins filling up far quicker during the time I used to always shop at Aldi.
// if any of this sounds unfamiliar, I'm not from Germany, so there might be regional differences
Why do you need to be wined and dined when buying groceries? It's the same as RyanAir; I'd be happy to be stacked like a sardine for a three hour flight if it means significant cost savings and I get from point A to point B all the same.
> Why do you need to be wined and dined when buying groceries?
Where did you get that idea? I simply want the experience that used to be the bare minimum just some 10 years ago. Aldi (and other stores with a similar model) fails to deliver that and usually isn't cheaper enough to justify it. If you only care about price and have the time and energy to deal with them, feel free, but for me, unless they have something I need on sale, I see no reason to. Most other stores are faster, less rushed and the quality is better for at most a few % higher price.
>>Reliance will hold down prices only till they receive a huge consolidation of sales and then you can expect the prices to jump.
Luddites have been pushing this narrative for anti-modernism for ages now, but it just doesn't come to pass. It's for a simple reason, capitalism wants you to buy more and therefore has it in its interests to sell you things for cheap.
Its just that the middle men have it easy, there is very little productive effort involved in buying things from X and selling to Y on K% profit, when compared to working in a factory.
5 or 10 years ago, a ton of deals would be at Amazon. Now it has dropped a lot. I have friends buying from Amazon for Black Friday when the deals at other stores are generally better. They are used to Amazon now.
I am not sure what the point is here. Your friends have freedom and ability to choose to buy from multiple retailers, Amazon has freedom to choose its selling price, resellers on Amazon have freedom to choose their price, and competitors to Amazon have the freedom to choose their price.
Amazon has a massive warchest which they used over decades to undercut their competitors.
Just like Uber does to theirs.
Yes, technically nothing apart from Billion dollars is stopping amazon's competition to beat amazon in their own game. You gotta a billion dollars I can borrow?
I don't think people understand the complexity of the supply chain. If it were possible for the manufacturers to directly sell to retail customers, they would be more than happy to cut off distributors and pocket that additional margin for themselves.
For a manufacturer to handle returns, expired products etc from retail customers or even retail outlets while having a manufacturing base in a different city/town is a huge headache. Many products (example: dairy and other perishables) require daily deliveries to retail outlets from manufacturers. Try doing this without a distributor arrangement.
Many Indian billionaires are into rent seeking [0]. Reliance is definitely one of those.
I don't think this will augur well for Indian economy even if the customer can make some savings in short run. After the market consolidation, Reliance can easily raise the rates. The margins that would have gone to N middlemen would now go to a few with Reliance taking the larger share. The Indian economy is not known for creating jobs lately.
> Many Indian billionaires are into rent seeking [0]. Reliance is definitely one of those.
Reliance made most of their money in Petrochemicals. It is India's largest exporter, accounting for 8% of India's total exports. They have other interests too, but I wouldn't classify them as a "rent-seeking" enterprise.
It wasn't affordable earlier. In fact internet/data plans were fairly expensive before the 4G days. It's a lot saner now.
>>Companies collapsed and merged and now the duopoly is jacking up prices so much that poor people have to pay 100rs just to keep card active
Please stop spreading lies, I still freshly remember the earlier days of paying some 500 rupees for a recharge and getting barely 150 minutes of talk time and that too with some 25 days of validity. And yeah the SMS, and other services were charged like 1 rupee per SMS.
One of the big wins Ambani claims to have achieved is how Jio exposed scammy pricing practices were in the telecom sector before.
Lol I have to recharge 260 to 300Rs for 1.5gb dataper day with unlimited calling.both of which I don't use because I do WFH & have to spend 1.5k per month on 100MBPS broadband
I also have to pay 100rs per month to keep my other sim active. Guess what? Before this shit show I barely paid anything as I don't call anyone or use net pack EVER.
But now I have to spend money to keep my number active. And guess what? The cost of doing so keeps on rising.
Probably jio fanbois don't realise this but monopoly doesnt give a crap about you. It's like startups with venture capital.. they give steep discounts to hook you in and then they jack up prices after destroying competition
Sure Jio reduced SMS prices (something nobody really uses anymore). Sure per GB data prices are reduced.. but can you really buy a topup any more only for calling? Nope. They bundle all kinds of crap and sell it for 300rs. How the f** is that cheap? How's that different than the 1re per SMS?
Sto pretending like you're getting a better deal. You're not. Just one year ago we had 45rs recharge to keep phone active now it's gone up to 99Rs starting tomorrow. Stop being an ostrich who hide shis head in the sand because he is too uncomfortable to realise the reality around him
For anyone reading this comment who is outside India. We never had anything called activation charges until very recently. People like the commenter above get a sim and not use it for months without paying anything and the provider had to make sure the number was ON. This became such a plague a provider went down under. Now all the providers came together and decided on a way to stop this from happening. As expected, there is an outrage.
> they give steep discounts to hook you in and then they jack up prices after destroying competition
You bough a Docomo sim. You have a jio sim now too. You don't get to talk about this. Don't be a hypocrite.
> but can you really buy a topup any more only for calling?
Do you see where it says "top up". Click that thingy and follow the instructions.
> Just one year ago we had 45rs recharge to keep phone active now it's gone up to 99Rs starting tomorrow.
If you're the kind of person who'd recharge for 100 rs and keep it for 6 months and expect top notch service, I hope they jack up the prices for activation to 1000 rs so they drive bad consumers like you out of the market so the rest of us can use the services as intended.
The way I see it, the earlier telecom charges were bad foe those who are using lot of data / calls etc. So post Jio it has been made cheaper for the rich folks
Now it has affected the bottom of the pyramid users.
Daily wage labourers don't have 250rs to spend on telecom per month.
I paid a lot of money to telecom and half the times the calls dropped. So stop lecturing me about how good telecom networks in India really are.
And the only reason you're having no issues with this wide open loot is because you're rich. Look at the rest of the population.
P.s. you claim that I have a Jio sim and I'll never have one. I don't have a jio sim. How the heck did you reach to this conclusion??
>Daily wage labourers don't have 250rs to spend on telecom per month.
They don't have to spend that much on telecom per month. Don't know where you get that idea from.
> I paid a lot of money to telecom and half the times the calls dropped. So stop lecturing me about how good telecom networks in India really are.
I pay a moderate amount of money and I've used Airtel and Jio for a very long time in cities and rural areas and I've had calls dropped maybe 5 times in my life. You must be doing something wrong.
> And the only reason you're having no issues with this wide open loot is because you're rich. Look at the rest of the population.
People with very meagre means have plans that they can use for internet. I'm talking about the bottom of the rung folks.
You must be extremely ignorant of how people use telecom providers or incredibly dense. I don't know which is worse but you're so out of touch with the ground reality there's no point in debating this.
How dense are you towards human suffering? Just because you're rich do you think everyone in India works in IT & earns Lakhs per month?
My parents, as kids were dirt poor family. My grandmother had to go hungry multiple times a week so that my father would get enough to eat. She wasn't "dieting", she didn't have enough money to buy enough food. That's what poverty is like.
Have you ever faced that in your life? You think the really poor people who don't know from where the next meal is coming from have 99rs to keep a number active?
But thank God you have to spend a little less out of the Lakhs you earn in a month on data packs, the data which you use to lecture people whose previous generations have been dirt poor about how 99rs per month isn't that costly. Geez.
This is like the Indian version of "if they're too poor for bread let them eat cake"
1. Middlemen form a large part of India's economy, and ripping the band-aid off can send ripples through the rest of the economy (that this will be a negative isn't guaranteed, though.)
2. Continuing from 1, middlemen are also a large bloc, and just like we've seen with the farm laws a strong push from them could lead to new laws to curb Jio's power, despite Ambani's strong links to the ruling party. We've already seen similar pushes against e-com companies leading to some success.