Ritchie Street

Introduction:

Ritchie Street, or Richie Street is located at the very center of Chennai- in fact, roughly opposite to the Central Secretariat building. It is located adjacent to Anna Salai, the arterial road of Chennai.

It is very easy to access, located about five hundred meters from the Chintadripet MRTS station, and about two kilometers from the Chennai Central railway station. A number of buses also go past the area, and there are three bus stops from which Ritchie street is less than a hundred meters away.

'Ritchie Street' is a flexibly used name, in fact used to connote four different streets, them being Narasingapuram Street, Wallers Road, Ritchie Street and Meeran Sahib street.

The area is home to almost a thousand stores specializing in electronics. The daily footfall in the area is estimated to be about thirty to fifty thousand- the area attracts this amount of attention due to the fact that the stores charge extremely competitive prices as compared to the rest of electronics stores in the city; additionally, it is due to reasons of convenience.

Firstly, it is in the center of the city, easing access.


Fig. 1 The central secretariat is visible at the end of the road

Secondly, a person wishing to buy, say, a computer and peripherals can be sure that he can get everything he needs in the same area- starting from the CPU to the additional graphics card, sound card, speakers, printers et al.

The nature of Ritchie Street shall be discussed further, following a short account of its history.

History:

The first electronics stores opened on Ritchie street in the year 1970; five shops, dealing in electronic components & spares. In the years following that 25 shops had opened up, and had become a very important market for electronic parts- people from all over Tamil Nadu used to use the market for their needs relating to electronics.

The area developed rapidly, but the sales tax structure hindered growth to a large degree for a few years.

A large number of un-billed sales resulted in a high quantum of losses to the government, so they enforced stricter regulations, conducted raids and increased the sales tax to 12%.

Despite this, the market progressed, and the sales tax ended up reducing drastically with changes in the political environment of the country. Between 1982 and 1990, 125 more shops had came up in the area, as sales tax continued to fall, eventually ending up at 1%- prompting many more people to set up shop in the area.

As mentioned earlier, the area is now home to over 900 shops.


Fig. 2

Demographics:

The owners of most of these shops hail from all over the country- a good number of them are from the North Indian Marwari community, while many also hail from Gujarat. The rest of the North Indians appear to be from the North East, but they seem to be occupying the secondary and tertiary posts in the shop, and are not too many in number.

North Indians in Ritchie Street are not a recent phenomenon- when they realized the economic opportunities in the area, they migrated south, some even over thirty years ago.

The area has Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jain proprietors- a large number of the Muslims are from Kerala. The Christians appear to be predominantly from Tamil Nadu, and the Hindus are from all over the country. Jains, of course, belong to the Gujarati community.

There are some proprietors who are fairly elderly, though most appear to be middle aged. Very few seem to be very young, and these younger people tend to own the shops that specialize in things such as the unlocking of iPhones, the sale of pirated games and so on.

The proprietors generally appear to be well off, judging by the amount of gold some of them wear, and their expensive watches.

Almost everyone working in these shops, that I observed, have fancy cellphones, but as a cellphone is a status symbol in our country, I hesitated to make generalizations about the economic status of all these people.

It must be noted that the older proprietors TEND TO have larger shops than the younger ones. The use of 'larger' is relative- these shops are all very small.


Fig 3. As illustrated by this building, space is utilized to the maximum for the setting up of businesses.

Nature of the goods sold:

Almost all the brands people aspire to own are available, with, for example, Apple products readily available, and there is also a plethora of cheap brands and fake products available.


Fig 4. an example of a product trying to cash in on the brand equity of a completely different product

It was interesting to note that shops on Wallers Road tended to sell mobile phones, and Narasingapuram street and Meeran Sahib street predominantly had shops engaging in the sale of computers and computer peripherals.

Ritchie street, on the other hand sold miscellaneous electronic equipment- largely public address systems and related audio equipment.

Ritchie Street in relation to Chennai:

Without doubt, the area is the center at which most electronics are sold, and the place which gets most customers for the same.

In the evenings the area is inundated with people, and it is advisable to be VERY careful with one's belongings at the time- this is largely the reason why my photos have been taken at a much safer hour, at around ten in the morning on a weekday. As one can see, it is still very crowded at this time, so one can be sure that the estimated average daily footfall of 30-50,000 by the Chennai Police is not too far off the mark.

As the information age progresses, areas like Ritchie Street end up benefiting a great deal. There are always new gadgets, on a somewhat painfully regular basis, and this is probably why they seem to have good business all the time.


Questions arising from the nature of Ritchie Street:

Firstly, one can ask why there are so many shops in the same area, dealing in the same sorts of goods. This appears to be the result of favourable conditions for the supply of these goods- as these goods all have to be supplied to one area in Chennai, the resultant transport costs are lower, hence enabling them to charge lower prices than dispersed stores.

Secondly, one can ask how all these shops seem to be sustaining themselves.

The force of synekism (as Soja defines it, the force of urban agglomeration leading to synergies resulting in positive outcomes for most part of the time)- appears to be active; the area has established itself as, apparently, the second largest hub for the sales of electronics in Asia. This is not only manifested in lower transport costs due to all the shops agglomerating in the same area, but through some more factors.

My answer for this is admittedly a little more vague, but it appears that they have a degree of social capital established, and they tend to cooperate in many ways.

If, for example, someone does not have a working credit card machine, or a certain type of printer, his neighbouring proprietor is always happy to lend a hand.

One other thing noted was that prices are roughly uniform through all the shops. So, by some form of implicit collusion and by not undercutting each other, nobody loses out.

One must of course be wary of the high-mark up- bargaining in this area is a necessity. A bulk of profits are probably made through selling products to the unwitting.

To conclude, it appears that a number of factors are operating in favour of these proprietors to continue their businesses- I asked a few whether they knew of any that had been closed down, and their standard answer was 'yes, two- three'. I take that as an indication that business model adopted has been largely successful.