How Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is fighting door to door to beat Mukesh Ambani

The world’s largest retailer is permeating the complex tapestry of the only billion-people-plus market open to it

If it wasn’t for last year’s extraordinary events, there would be nothing even remotely remarkable about Jayshri Hodkar’s struggle to survive as a single mother of two on the earnings of her tailoring shop, a single machine in one room of a rented house.

It’s one of those tens of millions of tiny businesses you see everywhere in India. Most are so nondescript it’s hard to imagine that together they supply the wheels on which the $2.7 trillion economy runs. Their value only became clear when the wheels came off.

This week last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sudden, complete lockdown. And that’s when the Mahi tailoring center in Indore, a historic city of 3 million in central India, become important to one of the world’s richest men — 7,000 miles away in Seattle. With no customers coming to get blouses stitched, Hodkar came to a conclusion: Her shop couldn’t battle the pandemic on her own. To pay the rent and school fees, she had to hitch a ride with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc.

The world’s largest retailer is permeating the complex tapestry of the only billion-people-plus market open to it. And it’s doing so by tweaking its business models to suit local preferences, practices, quirks — and Covid-19 disruptions. The “I Have Space” partnership Hodkar has signed up for allows entrepreneurs to collect Amazon packages for their area, safe keep them, and go door to door when they know there’ll be someone home to receive the orders. Drop-offs at the doorstep or in the mailbox may be common in the U.S., but they aren’t a workable option in India. Rather than waste money on failed deliveries, it helps Amazon to have a local as its ally. Hodkar tells me she’s making as much as she did before the pandemic for a few hours the 30-year-old spends on the road on her Honda Activa two-wheeler.

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