A product exchange fiasco at Hypercity, Hyderabad

Hi, so its been a long hiatus. Well, am back, for a while at least.

I want to document a particular incident that happened with me yesterday. So on 23-June, I and my wife went to Hypercity, purpotedly India's largest hyperstore in the Inorbit mall and bought ourselves an AKAI DVD player for some 2 grand.

We come home and try it on and the DVD reader doesn't work on any DVD or CD we could find. So, the next day, armed witht he puchase bill, I goto Hydeprcity and try to get a product refund or exchange. I see that a board there proudly proclaims a 14 day exchange policy. Wow, so the product exchange service, meant to de-risk and hence spike consumer trial and purchase, had come to India after all!

So, one floor employee plugs the DVD into one of their TVs and tries soem DVDs out. Same result. Then an entire baraat of line staff arrive to do the same. Its 30 mins plus by now. Clearly, the product is defective. But my queries are bounced along like email forwards within this ever changing group of line employees. Finally, after some 45 mins of endurance testing, someone from 'management' comes in. And then she tells me that store policy prohibits refund or exchange of electronic items.

Well, I'm foxed. Now, why go through this sordid product checking saga for so long, I wonder. And why not check the product before the sale, if this is what policy says?

So I try to reason with the lady - "Look, you sold me a defective product. Why don;'t you contact the vendor for recall? Why am I supposed to go to some service center somewhere when the product never worked even for 1 minute?" and so on.

But the manager is an expert at stonewalling. She continues to wave the policy document around. I tell her, "Fine, I've been a loyal customer, have bought 1000s in goods in the past year alone and that the store gains nothing from pi$$ing me off." She claims to understand. Well, OK.

"See, Wal-Mart, among the cheapest chains i nthe US offers a 60 day return policy. Why don't you keep good on your 14 day one?"
She says: 'But we're not wal-mart'.
"Sure, I can see you're not, but why not aspire to be world-class at least? Does a third-world location serve as a catch all excuse?" I argue. Deaf ears are all the rage by now.

Finally I ask her if she's line staff or managerial staff. She's foxed for a minute and then grandly declares she's a 'manager' here. And I try to explain that unlike line staff, who have no authority to deviate from policy, managers are supposed to exercise judgement. That is why they are given discretionary authority. Since she's clearly unwilling to do so, could she take me to her boss or somebody higher up who has the authority to take a decision?
"No, the boss is not in."
Yeah, right.

And my wife was planning on buying a flat-screen from that store. Imagine getting stuck with a defective product worth several 1000s instead of just a few 1000s? "Whew", I guess. The cloud perhaps did have a silver lining.

Anyway, object lesson here: Pls, pls, pls be careful when buying electronics, mobiles and the like from even fancy name stores, especially from Hypercity, Hyderabad. Always, always better to check the product in store prior to purchase. The fancy big-name stores may not be agreebale to that, if so ditch them.

Anyway, my 2 cents. Jai Ho.

Some Best Books I've read

Well, well.

Received this interesting email from a (former) student from the class of 2010. Small excerpt below:

I’d like you to fill up the blank below



If there is one book that I would want all my students to read it would be ______



Let this book be anything – a textbook, novel, fiction, non-fiction or anything else that has influenced you in your teaching.

Here's my rather long-winded (to my surprise) response. Another trip down nostalgia lane.

Hi A,


Congratulations on your graduation. And good luck for the journey ahead.


And I can identify with the bittersweet feeling of losing student-status permanently. Yup, my engg and MBA student days were easily among the happier ones in my late adolescent period, I guess. But it was time to move on and move on we all do. Time changes everything.



There’ve been many books I’ve read at different times of my life each time thinking this is the likely best book I will read in a while, each time to be proven wrong. In my late teens, I was a huge fan of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Early 20s, I was so, so taken in by Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. Then in my MBA days, by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, then by Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (From the Ramakrishna Mission Publication series), later by JRR's epic saga The Lord of the Rings, then by RajaGopalachari’s Mahabharata-the mother of epic sagas. So each period, different book.


The book I would most recommend now, the one that influenced me most recently, is, easily, Pavan K Varma’s Becoming Indian.

Masterpiece, I say. A book waiting to be written, one that almost wrote itself. Indeed, if it were upto me, I would make this book compulsory reading for every graduate in each of India’s elite institutions – from the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Administration (where civil servants train) to the IMA, Doon, the DSSC and the NDC (where the military elite train) to the IIMs and the ISB (where the Business elite train).


It’s a keeper. A collector’s item. Hope you’ll enjoy and imbibe it as much as I did.


Jai ho.

Some tweets

Well, am on twitter now.
http://twitter.com/sudvoleti
And its much, much easier tweeting interesting stuff as they come rather than write detailed blog posts about them.

Here's the weekly tweet dose:

"The best way to save is to not get into debt". Simple, powerful truism. Jai Ho.

Another gr8 Yindian success story. http://tinyurl.com/ygaaysy.

Joginder Singh in the Pioneer on India's anti-terror record. http://tinyurl.com/yebmpj7

The Economist on 'gendercide' - Chindia's terrible skew in the gender ratio. http://tinyurl.com/y9s8r2z

B-school jitters in Europe: Are Top Oiropean B-schools a clique? http://tinyurl.com/ye6qh9k

Efficient mkts hypothesis is dead. Easy to beat upon it now like Krugman does here: http://tinyurl.com/ybrklxj

A brief history of complex numbers. Fun read. http://tinyurl.com/y99urz5

Tom Friedman on the khosla and KR Sridhar innovations. http://tinyurl.com/yjp9uuh

IPL the world's most watched sporting event? A tad too ambitious, IMHO. But hey, dream big! http://tinyurl.com/ydazvk6

Shall keep posting tweets here more often.

What the phoren press is saying about India's Economic prospects

Martin Wolf has written a brilliant piece in the FT:
India's elephant charges on through the economic crisis

Excerpts:

Before the crisis the country's gross savings rate had hit 36 per cent of GDP (see chart). Given the country's attractions to long-term foreign capital, that would allow an investment rate of close to 40 per cent of GDP. (Aha!)Such a high rate of investment could deliver 10 per cent growth. It might deliver even more: since India's output per head (at purchasing power parity) is roughly a fifteenth of that of the US, the potential for fast growth is huge.

Importantly:

I was struck by the upbeat tone of the essay on "macroeconomic performance and policies, 2000-8" by Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the Indian government. Dr Acharya is the most sober of competent analysts of the Indian economy. Indeed, the book gives a strong sense of the confidence of the technocratic elite in India's performance and prospects. Similar confidence is palpable among the business elite. This confidence makes this a radically different India from the one I knew when I was the senior divisional economist for India, at the World Bank, in the mid-1970s.

The emergence of an elite consensus on where the country is going is clear to any regular visitor.

Very Importantly:

Another feature is the belief that the pragmatism of India's policies, particularly over global finance and the balance of payments, had proved correct. Those in charge of a vast country with so many vulnerable people are rightly wary of making their economy hostage to the sociopathic tendencies of the financial sector.

Ordinarily, I would've said perhaps 'sociopathic' is too harsh a term. But having seen US fin sector shenanigans in the past 18 months, am no longer so sure.

Very gratifyingly, however comes this disarming admission that just blew me over:

Exhausted by the burden of its pretensions, the UK should soon offer its seat on the security council of the United Nations to its former colony. Its condition would be that France does the same in favour of the European Union. Whether or not such enlightened statesmanship is forthcoming (presumably not), we are moving into the age of continental superpowers. Asia will be home to not one, but two, of them.

Jai Ho Indeed.

The Data deluge

Interesting article from the Economist here.

Those into marketing analytics, business intelligence, secondary data analysis in general should definitely read it, IMHO.

Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue). It has great potential for good—as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it.

Intrigued? Read on....

Mobile-phone operators, meanwhile, analyse subscribers’ calling patterns to determine, for example, whether most of their frequent contacts are on a rival network. If that rival network is offering an attractive promotion that might cause the subscriber to defect, he or she can then be offered an incentive to stay. Older industries crunch data with just as much enthusiasm as new ones these days. Retailers, offline as well as online, are masters of data mining (or “business intelligence”, as it is now known). By analysing “basket data”, supermarkets can tailor promotions to particular customers’ preferences. The oil industry uses supercomputers to trawl seismic data before drilling wells. And astronomers are just as likely to point a software query-tool at a digital sky survey as to point a telescope at the stars.

With time (say in another decade) India too shall become data friendly. Right now collection, collation and compilation of data into analyzable volumes is negligible from a business observer's POV. That should change a lot with prices plunging for the basic data collection infra (scanner machines, websites, mobile call directories and the like) feeding into databases.

Then the fun will start. Once the data are in, the modeling can take off.

Read the article in full. Worthwhile, IMHO.

Adios and keep in touch

Met a few folk from the MKTR class who're through with their placements. Congratulations, again.

There're also folk going entrepreneurial. My renewed congrats and good luck wishes to them.

Kindly keep in touch. Should any interesting business problem arise that has a data+modeling angle to it, kindly feel extremely free to sound me out. Am not saying I can solve it or otherwise help a great deal, but just that it wouldn't hurt to explore possibilities to mutual benefit.

There're also folks who are still in the job mkt. I've been there, done that. Can be a trying time. Don't lose heart, ever. Easier said than done, I know. Its no secret that entry level openings are always going to be much more abundant than experienced/lateral level ones. And a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.

Overall, I'd be extremely glad if anything you might have picked up in MKTR actually helps you out in the field. I'd very much like to hear from you if it does - would fill this great need for real-life Indian cases where MKTR was applied and worked. In any case, MKTR was also more about a way of thinking/reasoning than about some set of specialized analysis techniques. IMHO, of course.

As Alums, should you return to campus and I am around, would be nice if you could drop by just to say Hello and how you're doing and what all you've been upto since leaving campus.

Chalo, post's gotten too long already. HEck, I don;t even know if anybody visits this blog anymore. For sure, I myself ought to visit and post more often.

-Sudhir

Good luck for the placements push

A tad late in posting this.

But we fac have had to clear out of our office the past two weekends and again the coming weekend to accomodate the rush of employers matchmaking with ISB grads.

A Hajaar goodluck and bon voyage for the future. Hope you get the jobs you've always liked and wanted.

Am hearing good things about the placement this year. Esp compared to the dismal 2009 season.

Met a couple of MKTR students who have job offers in hand. Good show, folks.

Chalo, signing off for now. Good luck.