Pragathi Stores

If you’re ever in Kandivali and find yourself over at Magarpatta City, you’ll see the Amul Vora Shopping Mall. We are inside there at shop number 28. Pragathi Stores is basically your neighborhood general store, just inside a mall setting. We carry everything from soap and shampoo to bags of rice and lentils. It’s a lot of work keeping the shelves full because people are always coming in for their daily needs. The mall can get pretty loud on weekends, but during the week, it’s mostly just the local residents from the apartments nearby. I spend a lot of time checking expiration dates and making sure the stock is rotated. We don't have a fancy computerized system that does everything; a lot of it is still recorded in my big notebook. Sometimes the delivery trucks are late because of the Kandivali traffic, and we have to tell customers to come back tomorrow for their favorite brand of tea. We aren't trying to be the biggest store in the city. We just want to be the place where you can find what you need without a fuss. It’s a lot of standing on your feet and dealing with loose change. We know most of our regular customers by their names or at least by what they usually buy. It’s a simple, honest way to make a living, even if it gets a bit tiring by closing time. We just keep going.