11 Realities: A Blinkit vs Zepto Comparison

9. Impact on local retail (kirana stores)

Quick commerce arrived with punditry predicting major disruption to India’s ubiquitous kirana shops. Early reporting suggests the impact is mixed. In some neighbourhoods, rapid apps take convenience-focused orders that would otherwise be impulse purchases at kiranas. In other places, kiranas stay central by offering credit, home delivery, and a trusted relationship that apps cannot easily replace. There are also partnership models where platforms source from or collaborate with local stores, channelling online demand back into the kirana ecosystem. However, robust quantitative studies showing footfall declines or income shifts for local shops were not available in the assembled research. That gap matters—without city-level case studies, we can’t quantify displacement versus partnership outcomes. For customers, the hybrid reality often plays out as convenience plus local trust: apps win on speed, kiranas win on relations and flexible credit. Policymakers and industry watchers should push for systematic local studies to understand the net impact.