“Here, I get everything under one roof. And that saves a lot of time,” says Gurung, who until a year ago, used to make the rounds of stores in New Road and Ason to get the same things she currently buys at department stores.
“I had to visit one shop to buy cooking oil then trundle to another shop to buy dal, and so on and on,” Gurung says. Back then, shopping meant battling the dust and the choking smoke in the city air and dodging the puddles and the litter on the city streets. “It has become a lot easier now.”
Kathmandu first saw a department store in the mid 1980s, with the opening of Bluebird. Bhatbhateni came along a few years later. But although both these stores are today such permanent features of the Kathmandu cityscape and the shopper´s psyche, they had to face difficult times in the early days.
“In those days, only around 200 to 300 families used to visit our store per day,” says Binod Tuladhar, managing director of Bluebird Department Store. “Of those, 70 to 80 percent were upper-class families and the rest were expatriates.”
That was because many middle-class families used to consider these stores beyond their reach and would to stick to shopping in small mom-and-pop stores. Today´s middle-class Kathmanduite, besides putting a premium on speedy shopping, are also increasingly realizing that department stores also mean good deals. Gone are the days, when the average Kathmanduite viewed department stores as no-go zones, where, supposedly, only the rich splurged. These days, at Bluebird, for example, 80 percent of the customers are middle-class customers.
“The middle-class shoppers of today understand that department stores purchase products in bulk and at times directly from the company, that we also function as wholesalers, and that we sell goods in retail, focusing on high-volumes and low profit margins,” says Rupak Bhattarai, supervisor of Namaste Department Store.
Now, there are yet newer versions of the middle-class customer walking the aisles of supermarkets: overseas returnees. “They were or are used to shopping in these environments abroad and they form a bulk of our clientele base,” says Bluebird´s Tuladhar.
To cater to all these shoppers, there are already more than a dozen department stores in the valley alone, and newer department stores are sprouting up like never before. This burgeoning trend is not just limited to Kathmandu either. Because many of the overseas returnees in the country live in many cities across Nepal, places such as Pokhara, Dharan and Itahari are now witnessing the birth of the supermarket culture too. It´s thus not just about Kathmanduites anymore. The Supermarket-Shopping Nepali has arrived.
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