Ashutosh General Store

Our store is tucked into the Devpuja Apartment building on Jail Road in Nashik. We are quite close to Aarambh College, so we see a lot of students coming in throughout the day. They usually want snacks, cold drinks, or maybe some pens and notebooks for their classes. But we also serve the families living in the apartments around here. They come for the more serious stuff like laundry soap, cooking oil, and bags of flour. The Nashik Road area is usually pretty busy, and there is always someone walking past our door. The shop isn't very large, so we have to be smart about where we put everything. We have shelves reaching all the way to the ceiling, and we use a small stool to get things down from the top. It is a family-run operation, and we don't have any formal titles or uniforms. We just wear our regular clothes and talk to people like they are our neighbors, because most of them are. Sometimes the college kids are in a big hurry and we have to move fast, other times it is just a quiet afternoon of cleaning and restocking. We don't use any fancy marketing tricks. We just stay open the hours we say we will and try to keep enough stock so people don't have to go elsewhere. It is honest work and it keeps us connected to the community. We've been here for several years now and have seen many students graduate.