Maa Ambe General Stores

You can find Maa Ambe General Stores over in the Postal Park area of Patna. We’ve been set up here for a while, serving the people who live in the nearby lanes. It’s a standard neighborhood shop where you can find just about anything for your kitchen or cleaning closet. The street outside can get pretty crowded with bikes and people, so it’s often a bit of a squeeze to get through the door. We don’t have any fancy air conditioning or bright neon signs. It’s just a basic room with lots of shelves and a heavy wooden counter where we do all the weighing and billing. We spend a lot of time talking to the suppliers to make sure we get the fresh stuff in every week. Sometimes the crates are late because of the traffic in Patna, and we just have to wait it out. Our customers are mostly regulars who live within walking distance. They come in for their monthly rations or just a single bar of soap. We don't use any complicated systems for our inventory. We just look at the shelves and see what’s running low. It’s a very manual way of doing things, but it has worked for us so far. We just try to be helpful and keep the shop open as many hours as we can manage. It is about being there when someone needs a quick item.