The name P.G. Wodehouse normally does not spring to mind when talking about futurists. Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and Alvin Toffler certainly, but Pelham Grenville quite definitely not!
Wodehouse is someone one would associate with Bertie Wooster and the inimitable dolichocephalic, fish-eating Jeeves. Some may conjure up visions of the muddle-headed Lord Emsworth and his magnificent beast — the Empress of Blandings.
But the die-hard Wodehouse fan will also tell you about Rupert Psmith and his other schoolboy stories. Though often ignored and somewhat hard to find, many unusual nuggets lurk in these innocuous tales.
It is to one of these that I would draw attention. Titled “An International Affair”, it was published in
The story is rather prescient — it reads like the classic tale of the neighborhood mom-and-pop store facing the giant retailer. You could easily substitute the latter today with Walmart or Carrefour.
AN EERIE RING
Oliver Ring, the American owner of Ring's Come-one Come-all Up-to-date Stores, happens to be passing through the lazy English countryside town of Wrykyn, home to the boy's school bearing the same name. The shop windows in Wrykyn resemble those in every other country town in England, having no initiative and none of that quality that would arrest the pedestrian's progress.
In America, Mr Ring reflected, they did these things better, and then it dawned upon him that this was the perfect place for setting up one of his mega stores.
We are told that of Mr Ring's Come-one Come-all Up-to-date Stores are well known all over the world, with offices in Broadway, New York and others in Chicago, St. Louis and St. Paul within America. Overseas offices exist in London, Paris and Berlin — which basically amounts to saying everywhere in the world.
In Mr. Wodehouse's words, “The peculiar advantage of Ring's Stores is that you can get anything you happen to want there, from a motor to a macaroon, and rather cheaper than you could get it anywhere else.”
Of course, what he was describing was the early twentieth century, when one can only guess where these multitudes of products are produced. Not China, perhaps.
But once Mr Ring had taken his decision, an army of workers descends on the town, tearing down a bunch of tumble-down houses with a hitherto unknown efficiency and building the new Come-one Up-to-date store with incredible speed. Newspapers are flooded with the store's advertisements and the Wrykyn school also receives its fair share of flyers. Local merchants, who till now had paid scant attention to competition and modern hustle-and-bustle, are woken from their slumber by this new Phoenix of a store rising up right in their backyard. In the story, the villain of the piece, Mr Ring's store, targets Cook's, the local chai dhaba and favourite haunt of the Wrykyn boys, by offering a heavily-discounted afternoon tea.
DAVID Vs GOLIATH
Cook's is run by Mr Cook, a former sergeant in a line regiment, his wife, Mrs Cook, who has the unenviable ability to listen to five people simultaneously, and by an invisible menial or menials. An atmosphere of gloom descends on Cook's as the school-kids flock in droves to Come-one Come-all. Its owner feels “haunted by the spectre of that hideous, new, glaring red-brick building down the street.”
That is when a small group of loyal Davids decide to champion the cause of Cook's. In true British gentlemanly spirit, they first warn the newcomer to desist from destroying Cook's.
In the story, Mr Wodehouse clearly casts his lot with the mom-and-pop store and in the end it's still Cook's cuppa tea. What strategy Mr Wodehouse allows his Davids to use to bring down Goliath, I leave the interested reader to find out.
Regardless of the outcome, this short story captures very well the ethos of the battle between today's kirana store and the big retailer. The debate on retailing still continues. Right now, single-brand retailers are fine; a consensus still eludes multi-brand retail. And that seems hard in coming, despite the Centre trying to reach out to the States and proposing conditions such as the retail chains having to source a third of its products in India. That will hopefully create new employment, even as Big Retail may well put the local stores out of business.
Even if consensus may finally be reached, many battles like the one in Wodehouse's fictitious (or futuristic?) tale with their own Davids and Mr Rings may still be fought. In today's real world, of course.
(The writer is Professor of Economics, specialising in industrial organisation and applied game theory, at Louisiana State University.)