Have No Fear — India Will Change Walmart

September 2012's big-ticket reform — allowing foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail — was sold by its critics as the end of the Indian kirana store. Walmart, the great American behemoth, would roll in and crush the neighborhood shopkeeper. The fear was sincere. It was also, this argument goes, backwards.

Walmart already knew India, and India already knew Walmart. Through its Bharti Walmart joint venture, the company had been running Best Price Modern Wholesale cash-and-carry stores — the first in Amritsar, back in 2009 — selling to kirana owners and hotels, not consumers. Indian shoppers had never bought their dal the American way: in bulk, in a car, from a big box an hour away. They bought daily, on foot, from a shopkeeper who extended credit and knew their family.

The thesis of the "have no fear" school was simple: markets this distinctive don't get colonized, they get customized. Walmart in India would have to source locally, build supply chains from fragmented farmgate markets, win over state governments one at a time (retail being a state subject), and compete with a retail culture built on relationships, not price tags. India wasn't going to become Arkansas. Arkansas was going to have to learn Amritsar.

A decade and more on, the verdict is mostly in. Walmart's Indian retail journey stayed wholesale until it bought Flipkart in 2018 for $16 billion — betting on Indian e-commerce rather than Indian supermarkets. The kirana store, meanwhile, didn't die; it got digitized. Fear lost. Adaptation won.