Billing for your supermarket in Bihar
The monthly grocery run from the village, the festival offer that ends tonight and the godown behind the shelf.
Where a Bihar supermarket's staples come from
The staples on a Bihar supermarket's shelf come from these districts' fields and markets, and the buyers know the names.
- Patna has long been a major farm hub and trading centre, and its most active exports are grain, sugarcane, sesame and medium-grained Patna rice.
- Agriculture is the main income in East Champaran, with rice and sugar cane as major crops.
- Muzaffarpur farmers grow the GI-certified Shahi Litchi, and the first air export of it to the UK, in May 2021, was sourced from them.
- Darbhanga is famous for its trade in fish, mango and makhana.
- The Sonepur cattle fair in Saran is held each November on Kartik Purnima, where the Ganges meets the Gandak, and is one of the biggest cattle fairs in Asia.
From the family's trolley to the bag you packed yourself
The mother's list, matched line by line as you tap
Make each item once, with its rate and its unit: the sack, the tin, the kilo, the packet. The mother reads her list in her own order and you tap each item as she says it, so the bill and the list match line by line. The total is ready when she reads the last line, and the family reaches the stop in time.
A discount that starts on a day and ends on a day, written down
Set the Chhath discount on the day it starts and take it off on the day it ends. Every bill in between shows it, and every bill after does not. The customer who shows his old bill shows a bill whose date you can read, and there is nothing to argue about.
Each bag you pack yourself, as an item with its own rate
Make each pack of sattu, makhana or tilkut an item with its rate. The price on the screen is the price on the bag, because both come from the same place, and the count of each pack drops with each bill.
What a Bihar supermarket counter keeps on its phone
Bills on your phone
The bill goes to the mother's phone in the time she takes to reach the stop, so a family that is catching the five o'clock bus has its bill before the bus leaves.
Orders to suppliers
The wholesale trip for the monthly families is written as one order: rice and atta sacks and oil cartons, with the godown's count of each beside it, so the trip is made once for the first Sunday and not twice.
Daily reports
On the first Sunday of the month, today's sales at a glance gives the number of baskets and the total as the last bus leaves, before the cash box is counted.
Low stock warnings
Rice sacks and oil cartons show a low-stock warning before the first Sunday of the month, so the monthly families do not find the sack empty on the one day they come.
The last bus at five, an offer that ended yesterday and sattu packed in your own bags
The paper list in the mother's hand, with the last bus at five
Families from the villages come to the town store once a month with a paper list for the whole month, written in the order they remembered the things and not in the order of your aisles. The list has eighty lines. The cashier hunts for each item, the line grows, and the family must catch the last bus home at five.
The festival offer that ended yesterday and is still on the board
Before Chhath and Diwali the store runs offers on sugar, oil and sweets. The offer ends on a fixed day, but the poster stays up, and the customer who bought on the last day shows his old bill to prove the price. At the counter you decide between losing the margin and losing the customer, and nobody wrote down when the offer really began or ended.
Sattu, makhana and tilkut packed in the store's own bags
Local goods like sattu, makhana and tilkut are not packed by a company. The store weighs them into its own bags and writes the price in marker pen on the front. The hand-written board and the hand-written bag do not always agree, and the bag that left the shelf at the wrong price is only found at the end of the week.
Women's groups who put their stock and bills in one place
What supermarket owners in Bihar ask
The Chhath discount is on sugar only, not on oil. Will the bill take it off the sugar line only?
Yes. The discount sits on the sugar item, so only the sugar line is lower and the oil keeps its rate. Open a bill from the sale days and the sugar shows the lower rate.
How do I bill a pack of sattu that I weighed into my own bag?
Name the bag for your store, like sattu, store pack, and pack it to one weight. The bill carries that one rate, so nobody asks what the bag weighs.
Can I see how many families came on the first Sunday of the month?
Open the daily report for the Sundays. It lists every bill of each day, so you see how many baskets went on that day and what was in them.
Samastipur's potato stores and a store's own packs
Samastipur is a major potato producer with over 20 cold storages for potatoes, and it has many sugar mills and a large jute mill. A store in that district buys its potatoes and its sugar from near at hand, and its godown counts them as two lines.
One more local pack: Gaya's tilkut, which is on the national One District One Product list. The store weighs it into its own bag, writes the price on it in marker pen, and counts the bags on the phone.