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SUNDAY HINDUSTAN TIMES, MUMBAI

FEBRUARY 15, 2015

STUCK IN 37.5
A BUYERS
MARKET
MILLION

riddhi.doshi@hindustantimes.com

eres how this story happened.

On a certain mega sale day,
my 27-year-old brother woke up
three hours early to buy a smartphone for our dad. The website
had promised him a discount of
Rs 1,500, which he got. Chasing
the high of that discount, he
announced that he would also
buy a flat-screen TV which
he was getting at a great deal for Rs 25,000.
Our two-bedroom flat already has two TVs,
so, early morning, we were forced to talk
him down and get him to log out.
A few hours later, at work, a colleague
said he was basking in the glow of getting
a Rs 40,000 phone for Rs 23,000, but wondering what to do with his perfectly functional
existing one.
As we teased him about his dilemma,
another colleague announced that she had
bought five very pretty notebooks, which
she later realised she had no use for.
A quick post on Facebook, asking if there
were others out there concerned about their
online shopping habits, garnered 20 responses in 30 minutes.
For many, the online shopping compulsion is no laughing matter.
As websites turn to apps, and annual
mega-deals turn into weekly snares, people,
it turns out, are spending far more than they
realise, and sometimes far more than they
want to. Some are running up credit card
bills they cant pay, others are borrowing
money from parents, still others are running
out of space to put all their purchases and
some are battling mounting guilt over packages that were never even opened.
Its a sea change from the time, about
eight years ago, when online shopping websites were dismissed by consumer behaviour
experts, who believed that the touch-andfeel-driven Indian buyer would never commit to an abstract.
The advent of shopping portals and
increasing number of mobile internet users
has phenomenally altered consumption patterns in the country, says Piyul Mukherjee, a
sociologist specialising in consumer behaviour.
The ease and convenience of shopping online
coupled with the service-first approach of
easy exchange policies, pre-payment trials and
multiple discounts is making people give in
to wants like they never did before.
In this scenario, more is less, adds psychologist Deepti Makhija.
The endless variety of products available online, combined with the bombardment of SMSes, emails and customised ads
constantly telling you what not to miss out
on, lure you into a consumerist cycle, says
Dr Vivek Benegal, a professor of psychiatry
at the NIMHANS de-addiction centre run by
the National Institute of Mental Health and
Neurosciences in Bangalore.
Driven by the compulsion, buyers are at
risking of contracting affluenza, says Dr
Makhija a painful, contagious, socially

159
MILLION

People from across

rural and urban
India who shopped
online in 2014

Lured by deals and discounts,

a growing number of young Indians
are finding themselves hooked to
online shopping, unable to pay their
credit card bills, and battling guilt over
boxes that were never even opened

Riddhi Doshi

Number of mobile internet users in

India, as of October 2014

10 MINUTES

Average time the individual

shopper spends on e-tailing
portals every day

$4 bn

28 - 3
0

Estimated
worth of the online shopping
market in India in 2014

35%

35%
ated ers
stim
An e ne shopp
li
of on op via
sh
ps
now
ne ap
tpho
smar

Avera
ge age
of tho
buyin
g app
se
are
and a
ccesso l, shoes
ries o
nline

$1.5 bn

Estimated worth of the

online shopping market
in India in 2013

45 - 5
0

Avera
ge ag
e of t
buyin
hos
g
such high-value e
as jew
it
ellery ems
furnit
and
ure o
nline

1M0ILLION

om nd
a
le fr
Peop ss rural who
o
r
c
dia ine
a
n
I
n
l
urbapped on
sho 011
in 2

(SOURCES: TELECOM
REGULATORY AUTHORITY
OF INDIA, INTERNET AND
MOBILE AUTHORITY OF
INDIA, AND IMRB
INTERNATIONAL WEB
AUDIENCE MANAGEMENT
PROJECT)

THE ENDLESS VARIETY

OF PRODUCTS AVAILABLE
ONLINE, COMBINED WITH THE
BOMBARDMENT OF SMSES,
EMAILS AND CUSTOMISED ADS
CONSTANTLY TELLING YOU WHAT
NOT TO MISS OUT ON, LURE YOU
INTO A CONSUMERIST CYCLE.

IMAGE:
THINKSTOCK;
HT GRAPHIC:
SANJAY TAMBE

BUYING NOW

DR VIVEK BENEGAL, professor of psychiatry at the

de-addiction centre run by the National Institute of
Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore

transmitted condition of overload, debt,

anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged
pursuit of more.

BUYERSREMORSE
LUCKNOW

In a sense, the online buyer is heading

into a perfect storm.
Even though none of the portals is
making profits right now, given their huge
logistics costs and probably wont for about
three years they will continue offering
attractive deals and lowered prices as they
aim to change the Indian consumers mindset
and rake in the profits or get huge funding
after they successfully build a large customer
base, says Sushmul Maheshwari, director of
RNCOS, an e-commerce consultancy firm.
Marketing and advertising analytics
are also playing a big role, says Nilotpal
Chakravarti, associate vice-president of the
Internet and Mobile Association of India.
When you talk about attending a friends
wedding on Facebook, ads for portals selling
ethnic wear will pop up on your page. This
means somebody is tracking your cookies
closely and knows exactly what to offer you,
Chakravarti adds.
People are even buying jewellery
and lingerie online,
encouraged by promises such as Zivames
offer to exchange the
product how many
ever times it takes till
the customer finds the
right fit. The website
is now receiving eight
times many orders as
it was three years ago.
We get 2,500 orders
every day, says Richa
Kar, founder and CEO
of Zivame.
This is driving the
growth of the sector on
the whole. In 2007, we
could count the number
of shopping portals on
our fingers. Now there
are hundreds of them
out there, says Ashish
Jhalani, founder of
e-commerce research
company etailing India.

NOIDA

FRIENDS CALL ME SHOPPERS STOP

REELING YOU IN

nant Nigams friends call him

Shoppers Stop. The 20-year-old
college student is such an avid
shopper, they say, that anything
you need, chances are he either
has it or can order it for you in seconds, at a discount, off one of the 12
shopping apps on his phone.
I can never resist weekend deals
and sales days, the youngster
admits, laughing. I buy everything
online, from groceries to gadgets.
Nigam spends his entire monthly
allowance of Rs 3,000 online, and
often needs at least another Rs 1,000,
which he gets from his father, a tech-

SAMIR JANA/HT

nician with a TV news network.

About once a week, I buy something wristbands or gym wear,
sunglasses, watches or gifts for my
girlfriend, he says.
This is aside from the shopping he
does for his family, who are also now
hooked to the online deals. Mom
and Dad were very impressed when
I showed them the online discounts.
Now, they often ask me to use my
apps to order groceries and electrical appliances too, he says. Now,
malls are places to hang out and
watch movies, not make purchases.
OLIVER FREDRICK

KOLKATA

MUMBAI

NO SPACE TO PUT
ALL THAT I BUY

DONT EVEN LIKE

SOME OF THE THINGS
IVE BOUGHT

adhurima Banerjee, 25, can no

longer fit all her purchases into
the cupboards and cabinets in
her room. Slowly, they have crept
onto the furniture; some now sit
on the corners of her bed.
I may survive without eating or
sleeping, but definitely not without
shopping, she says. Banerjee, a special
educator, starts her day with a quick
glance at the shopping websites bookmarked on her computer, and ends the
day with the satisfying feeling that
more goodies will be delivered soon.
Over the past four months, Banerjee has
found herself overshooting her monthly
shopping budget of Rs 9,000, and now has a
running account with her father. She says
its now natural for her to be penniless by
the third week of every month.
I just wish Madhurima could restrict
herself to things she actually needs,
says her father, Supriyo, an artist.
SUDATTA BHATTACHARJEE

INDIA MATTERS

278
MILLION

Number of
Internet users in
the country, as
of October 2014

17

IVE BOUGHT 70
PAIRS OF SHOES
IN THREE YEARS
dvertising professional Aanchal
Bhargava, 28, spends about 40% of
her salary online.
The commute from Noida to
my Gurgaon office and back is
long and boring, so I surf on my phone
and laptop, she says.
Bhargava admits that she doesnt
need many of the things she buys like
more earrings or the 70 pairs of shoes
she has bought online over the past
three years.
I get drawn in by the variety of
pretty things available online and the
convenience of buying them, she says.
I do feel like crap for having spent so
much, but I cant stop. When I really
need something, I step out and
buy it. Shopping online is a
feel-good thing.
RIDDHI DOSHI

hreya Badola, 25, buys about one thing

a day, on average. Earlier, I could shut
my laptop and disconnect, but now these
apps are on my phone and in my face all
the time, says the marketing executive.
Badola has 10 shopping apps on her
phone, downloaded over the past three
years. She spends about 60% of her salary
on her online shopping mainly shoes,
clothes and accessories.
When I had to go the mall, it was an
effort getting there, walking around. Now,
its all just a click away, she says.
Badola, 25, now finds herself borrowing
from her parents to take care of her nonshopping expenses.
I sometimes wonder how I got into this
situation, she says. I dont even like some
of the things Ive bought. My father says I
should invest. I sometimes agree but shopping makes me happy.
RIDDHI DOSHI

BURHAAN
KINU/HT

EVERYDAYARCHIVE THE QUIRKY AND THE HUMOROUS ARE THE OBJECT OF THIS ART PROJECT
ART FOR FOLKS SAKE
Paramita Ghosh

paramitaghosh@hindustantimes.com

t a job centre in Cornwall, Dean Biggs,

the person manning the front office,
stares at the letters of individual
employees explaining the reason for a
leave of absence, piling up on his table.
Its his job to take these Sick Notes from
the front desk to a supervisor. So he doodles
a design on the envelope each time a letter
drops onto the table, as a way of giving it his
own personal seal. Or simply to amuse himself during work hours.
Zebedee the Tax Cat, made of an inflatable ball in a tax office by one colleague for
another, is another whimsical object, among
more than 280 such objects, paintings, installations, videos and posters on show at the
Folk Archive exhibition at the Indira Gandhi
National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi.

It showcases a side of Britain thats travelled

less well to India.
A poster of Queen Elizabeth and Prince
Philip next to a directory of clowns;
Princess Diana as a signboard painting in a
beach town; a cabinet displaying spectacles
mounted with faux eyeballs; plastic severed
limbs next to a bottle of instant turd; a photograph of a motorcycle hearse, a funeral
run at 100mph by a cleric-biker for dead bikers; protesters asking Tony Blair to listen
to them and not his wife the line between
satire and subversion, comedy and pathos
and the quintessential British sensibility
of getting on with life helped on by a droll
sense of humour, is well in evidence here.
The Joke Shop cabinet is one of the
most striking exhibits of the show. It has
been sourced from a shop in Blackpool,
Lancashire, a popular holiday town, where
it would appear that all sorts of digres-

Alan Kane and

Jeremy Deller, the
artists behind the
Folk Archive.

PHOTOS COURTESY
BRITISH COUNCIL

sive behaviour are the norm as tends to

be the case in places and moments that
are removed from our daily lives. In Folk
Archive, we have concentrated on a personal
selection of things that caught our fancy;
objects such as these particularly appeal to
our idea of the ability of people to laugh at
themselves and the centrality of humour

in human creativity, say artists Alan Kane

and Jeremy Deller who have put together
this collection.
Why is it that we have not seen such a portrayal of British life before? Kane and Deller
say their aim was to present a picture of the
UK from the ground level. Everyday visual
creative energy is abundant in the UK, but is
often overlooked or undervalued. The types
of things in the show range from examples
of signs and marketing material, expressions of discontent and political affiliation,
exuberant performances, costumes and
activities almost anything we could find
from the streets which had a visual excitement, they say.
Tar Barrel Rolling, for instance, a Devon
annual event, involves locals running around
town carrying huge, heavy, burning barrels
on their backs, and is an absolutely crazy
event, says Deller, a conceptual artist who
won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004. Its
popular with locals and visitors. It is incredibly striking visually, and it very much flies
in the face of sensible behaviour and of the

current climate of health and safety in the

UK. The main conclusion we arrived at from
making the exhibition is that people from all
walks of life are inventive, energetic, visually
sophisticated, and surprising.
Kane, for instance, draws attention to an
exhibit, Protest House,
a photograph of a
tenant who had a longstanding dispute with
the city council and used the
faade of his house to plaster
his grievances on. The community and the individual, more
than the broad strokes of a national character, are clearly the artists
focus. This is perhaps why individual and folk politics, oddities
and eccentricities have been
given the space and respect
in this exhibition normally
accorded to art.
(Folk Archive is on at
Mati Ghar, IGNCA, till
February 27)

Vegetable Animal
by GH Ghent,
Lambeth Country
Fair, London 2004,
one of the selections
for the archive.

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