Billing for your mobile shop in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
The phone, the screen you replaced and the bill the customer can show a year later, all on one page.
The advance, the part and the final bill on one customer's page
The part is aboard or it is not, and the page says which
The question from the other island is always the same: has the part come? The job sits on the customer's page with the part you ordered, so you read the answer in a moment. When the part comes, note it, and the job is the first of the morning.
One ship's order made from the jobs waiting on the bench
Each screen costs a ship, so the order is made before the ship sails. Every phone waiting for a screen is a job on a page, and the jobs together are the order. One ship, one list, and nothing left behind that should have gone on the boat.
The afternoon the copra money is spent, counted by evening
When copra is sold, the cheapest handsets and the chargers beside them go in an afternoon. The evening list shows how many of each left, and that number, not the quiet weeks before it, goes to the supplier on the next order.
A repair that waits for a part from the mainland
The phone that met the sea
A phone that fell from a jetty or got wet on a boat comes in on a rough morning, and the owner wants it dried and working before the evening ferry. You open it and see that the part that failed must come by ship. What do you tell her, and what has she already paid?
A phone is bought the week the copra money comes
In the Nicobar islands, where copra is the livelihood, money arrives in a lump when a lot of it is sold, and a phone is bought that week. The shelf sits quiet for weeks, then the cheapest handsets and chargers go in an afternoon. You cannot tell the supplier how many to send, because the quiet weeks before looked empty.
The warranty bill is in a drawer on another island
A phone bought here is carried home to a smaller island. When it fails under warranty, the only paper that says when it was bought is the bill, and that bill is in a drawer in another house or was never kept. A bill that went to her chat is the paper that does not get lost between one house and the next.
Tools for a counter of phones, cables and spare screens
Low stock warnings
The cables for the common ports and the charger sizes carry warnings, so the one a customer wants is on the shelf more often than not.
Orders to suppliers
The spare screens ordered from the mainland supplier written from the repair list, with a note of the day each one arrived.
Bills on your phone
Phone, case and charger for a customer from a smaller island at three rates on one bill, so she can show on the jetty what it cost when her sister asks.
How a phone screen crosses the water
A screen, a battery or a phone arrives by the same route as the rice.
- Port Blair has the Haddo, Wharf and Chatham harbours for ships to the mainland, about 1,190 km from Chennai and 1,255 km from Kolkata. A box of spare screens covers that sea distance before it reaches your counter.
- Trade in copra, dried coconut kernel, has long been the mainstay of the Nicobar islands, which depended almost entirely on copra exports for outside goods (2010 report). A phone shop in Nicobar sells to people whose trade has long been coconut.
Questions Andaman mobile shop owners ask
A screen I fitted failed within a week. Did the other screens from that ship come with the same trouble?
When a part arrives you note it with its supplier, so you see which order the failed screen came in. The rest of that order still in the drawer are the ones to try before you fit another.
A customer asks why a screen costs more here than on the mainland. What do I show him?
Show him the bill. The screen is one line with its own rate, and your work is another line, so he reads what the part cost and what the labour cost.
A customer taking a phone on a boat asks for a pouch to keep the sea off it. Is the pouch a separate item?
Yes. The pouch has its own item, rate and count, apart from the power bank. If he takes both, the bill has two lines, and the pouch count falls on its own.
A customer asks whether it is worth repairing the screen or buying a new phone. What do I show her?
Both are items with their rates, so the screen repair and the new phone are on the screen side by side, and she sees the two numbers before she decides.
Before the cable under the sea
Mobile data was almost non-existent before the Chennai-Andaman undersea cable was launched on 10 August 2020; Airtel and Jio now offer mobile data in the islands. A phone shop that sold phones before that date sold them to people who could mostly make calls.
Until December 2020 the islands had no fibre link to the mainland and relied on slow satellites, with no 4G or 3G and barely working 2G on most islands. So on the smaller islands the change came months after Port Blair, and a phone shop there sold its first phones for mobile data later than one in town.