Why Swiggy should buy Grofers

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Editor's note: Credit must be given to Albinder Dhindsa for surviving the challenge of being in the business of online retail. The co-founder of Grofers, one of SoftBank’s early bets in India, Dhindsa has weathered a period of time in which how you purchase essentials has changed drastically. And in this time, almost every company worth its salt, from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail to the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, and startups such as BigBasket, Flipkart, Milkbasket, and adventurous opportunists like Ola, Zomato and Swiggy have all jumped in. That Grofers, a middle-of-the-pack player at best, has survived the above milieu is a miracle. The allure of online grocery is easily explained, because on the outside it resembles any other delivery business opportunity which has a frequent use case. So get goods from the retailer and deliver them to the customer and make a small commission from both sides. The only problem is that unless order or basket sizes cross a certain threshold, the unit economics do not make sense. There’s the other problem that a business cannot charge a premium on …