Ten minutes to your door, no minutes to clean

Description

On 22 August, enforcement teams raided the dark stores behind quick commerce grocery apps across Hyderabad. They found expired stock, pests, and vegetables gone to fungus, and shut four stores on the spot. Days earlier, Maharashtra pulled around a dozen licences from Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. Everyone's cheering the crackdown but it can't fix what it found. To deliver in ten minutes, it has to sit in your neighbourhood, which means it can't be big. To win your order, it has to carry more than the rival app which means it has to hold a lot. Small footprint, huge inventory. Something has to give, and it isn't the inventory.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.