Patel-morph
I visited the first store of Patel Brothers that is in Devon near Chicago in 2006 and was amazed at the stock of provisions that is usually seen in supermarkets around India. The owner of the store, Mr Mafat Patel, was at the store greeting some of the regular customers. For someone who was back-calculating the price to Indian Rupees, the supplies looked quite expensive. It was a matter of availability for those who had their income in US Dollars. The customer profile looked predominantly Indian and Hindu to me.
More than a decade and a half later I happened to shop at the Patel Bros store in Virginia. It was much larger than the Devon store and was better stocked with in-house brands rubbing shoulders with known names. There was an entire section of the store where fresh food was being manufactured, packed and shelved. The store was full of customers and the staff was a good mix of South Asian and hispanic. I needed some help in navigating the stock and the young store manager sitting on a corner table supervising the operations conversed in Hindi to help me.
I visited both their New Jersey stores at Edison in 2023 and was amused at the speedy growth of this enterprise. There were many other stores at the vicinity stocking Indian goods but none of them came anywhere close to Patel in terms of size of operations. The customer profile did not seem to have changed too much.
The Devon store looks very different in 2024. Most of the customers and the staff in the store were dressed in a way that advertised the religion they follow. The store has moved on from being a vegetarian-only outfit to one that stocks non-vegetarian food. Quite obviously, the next generation of owners are not too steadfast about keeping the store vegetarian and are catering to the demographic change in their area of operation.
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