One of the best hypermarkets in the world

Retail mavens:  add LuLu to the list of stores you need to see. 

You need to see to believe.

LuLu?

Fly to the fabled Malabar Coast of India, to the 3.5-million-person city of Kochi in the state of Kerala.

Find your way to Edappally Junction, and on a Sunday night at 8 p.m., enter a 730K square foot mall that is absolutely buzzing with humans and humans carrying shopping bags.

Work your way through the crowd, past the line waiting to enter the McDonald’s, around the mob of parents and kids enjoying a children’s fashion show, and head toward the mall’s owning and anchoring entity:  the LuLu hypermarket.

As you approach the entrance, jet lag brings with it a dose of skepticism.  Our host wants us to see this, but c’mon -- hypermarkets are hypermarkets. 

Not true.

Across a wide front are 38 lanes.  All open.  All with lines of customers.  The background music is the bink-bink-bink of hundreds of thousands of units rolling through check-out, the beautiful sound of top-line revenue.   

(On a Sunday night at 8 p.m.)

 We squirm through the entrance with dozens of other shoppers. 

And the mouth drops.

A+ hypermarket square footage.  Wider-than-wide aisles, spotless floors, associates filling in stock right and left.  The beautiful fresh produce of South Asia, in abundance and merchandised just so.   Private label baked goods, primly packaged and assorted across a wide range of tastes and portion sizes.  A fresh meat and fish section to satisfy any carnivore – no beef, of course, but a wide and deep selection of buffalo, chicken, and the fish of the adjacent Arabian Sea.  Associates pointing customers toward product.  And global brands, regional brands, local brands. 

And shoppers.  And shoppers.  And shoppers.

Cynics may sneer that the local cost of labor makes this all possible.  But the local cost of labor does not account for the organizational and operational brilliance of this Kochi store, nor the evident merchandising and product development smarts.

This is a retailing machine. 

Oh. My. God.        

Wikipedia tells us that LuLu Group International is an Emirati-based multinational firm that operates hypermarkets and retail real estate in across the Middle East and South Asia.  Founded in 2000 by M.A. Yusuff Ali, a native of the India state of Kerala, it currently operates 259 outlets, with revenues estimated in 2020 to be $7.4B USD. 

I’m thinking that I’ve just visited one of the best stores in the world.

I’m Jon Stine, 35+ years in retail business and technology.

I read, I write, I advise.

Jcstine1995@gmail.com, +1 503 449 4628.