As residents across NCR reel under the effects of demonetisation, City Spidey decided to find out how it affected business at malls in Noida this weekend. And it seems the change in the financial system has taken a toll on retailers and businesses as well.
We made the rounds at one of the malls in Noida to discern the state of affairs. According to the staff at the reception desk of a mall in Sector 38, the change in the financial system did not make much difference to the daily footfall in the mall. The footfall was higher on weekends as usual.
However, further probe revealed that although there was no significant change in the footfall, sales inside the mall had gone down.
Management of eateries, restaurants and the multiplex told City Spidey that the demonetisation had caused a major dip in their sales, with a daily loss of over 40 per cent. The staff of Vaango, a south Indian restaurant in the mall, while pointing at the empty tables, said that people generally have to wait in a queue to get a table for themselves on a weekend.
Similar views were shared by the staff of Nazeer, a north Indian restaurant, who said that those customers who generally paid in cash, and who made up almost half of the lot of customers, had vanished overnight.
However, the management staff of KFC, an international fast food chain, maintained that there had been a slight drop in the sales, but it did not make much difference as the customers paid either through third party payment gateways or by debit or credit cards. They added that there has been a significant increase in the use of third party payment gateways these days.
Multiplexes and movie halls seemed to be the worst hit. The staff of the multiplex in the mall said that considering it was a weekend, there has been a drop of over 50 per cent in the sale of movie tickets. They said that they normally have a footfall of over 4,000 moviegoers on weekends, but they hardly sold 1,500 tickets on November 12.
Some of the shop owners and managers of stores in the mall said that they desperately wished the situation returned to normal as it was having a significant impact on their business.
