A third of retailers facing 100% attrition: TCS-RAI survey

While dept stores exhibit the lowest levels of attrition, 55% of value retailers have attrition levels of over 8% in a month

A third of Indian retailers are seeing attrition of around 100% a year at the store level, says a sample survey conducted among Indian retailers.

According to the survey done by Tata Consultancy Services and Retailers Association of India (RAI), about 33% respondents said they had average attriton rates of more than eight per cent per month, which almost translates to 100% a year.

While department stores exhibit the lowest levels of attrition, 55% of value retailers have attrition levels of over eight per cent in a month, TCS-RAI said on the findings of the survey.

"Both large and small format retailers have been impacted by this phenomenon. In smaller format stores especially in fashion space, change of key employees can impact sales by 15 to 20%. Hence retailers tend to keep a hawk eye on store attrition levels and are taking a multi pronged approach to address it," the survey said.

The survey was done from July 2012 to January 2013 and 34 retailers participated in the survey.

Consultants say growth in organized retail is throwing up a lot of opportunities for front end staff.

"More and more people are shifting jobs as retailers open new stores. Employees are even shifting for a hike of Rs 500 a month as they don't get paid huge salaries," said Prashant Agarwal, deputy managing director of Wazir Advisors, a retail consultancy.