On this episode of Future of the Business World, we travel to India to learn about a student 2022 Global Youth Comment & Win contest. Here, we discover all the details of how his passion for books and Wharton Global Youth: Now let’s think about the pandemic for a minute. The roads were empty, the streets were empty. A lot of people had to quarantine. And suddenly this traffic that would be normally cruising by and perusing the books, including the foreigners, was no longer there for them. So how did the pandemic impact them? Kush: It was sort of the elephant in the room. It wasn’t exactly the pandemic itself that almost crushed their business. It was the build-up in the previous years as well. For the past five to six years, technology has been upscaling rapidly. And we’ve seen ecommerce platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, which are major platforms in India, they sell their books online at much more affordable rates, since they sell it at wholesale prices. So that’s why these vendors were struggling specifically, because book lovers now did not want to step out of their homes, go to the vendor, and buy the book. Instead, they could just get delivered at their home at their convenience. So that was really hurting their business. And then in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. So that was sort of almost the killer blow for these vendors, because as soon as the pandemic struck, as soon as the cases started to increase, the government instituted a lockdown throughout India. And that’s why no one was able to step out. No one except essential workers was allowed to step out of their homes to do any task except essential services or buy essential Source link
