When the rest of India was panic-buying induction cooktops online and refreshing Blinkit hoping for a restock, one store in Visakhapatnam had already done the math weeks earlier.
Bombay Gaslight Stores, established in 1945, was selling 100 induction cooktops a day this week. Before the LPG crisis hit, the number was 2 to 3 pieces. On a good day.
The owner saw it coming. His son made a reel about it. And the story of how an 80-year-old business in Vizag read the market better than every algorithm-driven e-commerce platform in the country is worth watching.
While Amazon and Flipkart were going out of stock and Blinkit was showing empty shelves across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, Bombay Gaslight Stores had inventory. Not because they got lucky. Because the owner, whose family has been in the appliances and gas equipment business since India was still under British rule, looked at what was happening in the Middle East, looked at what India imports for LPG, and placed a bulk order with his wholesaler before the chaos arrived.
His son captured the moment on a reel — the shelves stocked, the queue outside, the numbers on the counter. A hundred cooktops a day in a single store in Visakhapatnam is not a coincidence. It is the result of eight decades of reading commodity markets from a shop floor.
When the Iran war disrupted the Strait of Hormuz and CLSA began warning of acute LPG shortages, the experienced businessman drew on a pattern library that no machine learning model has access to: lived memory of what happens to Indian households when gas becomes expensive or scarce. They switch. They always switch. And when they switch, they go to the nearest appliance store and buy whatever works. Two to three induction cooktops per day was the baseline. One hundred per day is the new reality. That is a 33 to 50 times increase in single-product daily sales at one store in one city, consistent with the national picture where Amazon reported approximately a 20-fold surge and Flipkart saw sales quadruple within 24 hours of the LPG crisis becoming visible to consumers.
This article is for informational purposes only. The reel is embedded above.