Winter setting in, contrary to expectation of the volume of sale of the woollens, electrical items and others required to beat the cold shootting up, the number of customers for blowers and heaters is less this season as compared to the previous one.
The reasons behind this comparatively low volume of sale for the winter paraphernalia are varied. One of them is the fact that winter has set in a tad late this year and another is the people opting increasingly for online shopping as these are offering lucrative offers on the products they sell.
Online shopping keeps adversely affecting the sale of the traders, be it any festival or any other occasion when the sales tend to generally shot up. Rajender Malhotra, a trader of electronics based in Dehradun, said that the sale has all but halved this year. “We used to sell around 25 to 30 blowers and heaters each day, but now it has come down to a paltry 10. We, however, apprehended this trend as during the summer, the sale of coolers dipped down considerably. We might have accounted the less trying summer heat this year for this low volume of sale. But we felt the main reason lay elsewhere.
During Diwali, we found our sale plummeting considerably again, buttressing our view that the increasing trend of online shopping is bringing our trade to a loss. The same is befalling us in this winter too. We are incurring losses on end,” he said. “Things are extremely gloomy for us,”he added. Electronics trader Rakesh Bharti said, “We can hardly stand the unequal competition with the online companies. Rather deeper gloom seems to be what is awaiting us, we apprehend.”