In most Delhi colonies, Diwali used to be announced at the corner kirana. Marigolds and fairy lights would go up all over the shop front, boxes of dry fruit and sweets would be stacked up by the counter, and the diyas would spill out onto the road. For the shopkeeper, it was the busiest time of the year by far, the time when the shop would be kept afloat through the rest of the year.This Diwali season, the lights are on, but the counter is quieter. There is no jostling for space, no children tugging at their parents’ sleeves for a box of phuljhadis, no Uncle calling out to his helper to fetch another carton from the godown. Instead, a young fella we didn’t know was in charge at the kirana in our lane, scrolling through his phone between the occasional customer. When I asked after Uncle, he told me, almost apologetically, that Uncle had sold the shop a few months ago. There were far fewer customers coming in now, he said; most of the old families just order online — milk in the morning, sweets for guests, even the diyas for Lakshmi puja.AdvertisementThe social economy of the kiranaThe kirana was more than a shop. The owner knew the families in the area: Who had moved in, whose kids were at which school, which house was up for rent. All purchases went into a monthly khata, which was settled at the end of the month. If something was out of stock, he would get it by the end of the day. In economic terms, it was retail, informal credit and local information all in one counter, held together by trust.The kirana and the colony parlour are part of India’s MSME sector (over 7.47 crore enterprises, supporting around 32.8 crore livelihoods as per the Ministry of MSME 2026), with the vast majority of them being micro units with very thin margins and little capital. They now find themselves in direct competition with well-funded platforms. Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes, Amazon Now, BB Now and JioMart all deliver groceries (including Diwali essentials) in minutes. Quick commerce crossed 9 million orders a day in August 2026 (Datum Intelligence, as per Entrepreneur India August 2026), and the dark store network of the three largest players grew by nearly 48 per cent over the course of a year to 5,026 stores (Equirus Securities 2026). 82 per cent of the buyers have shifted at least a quarter of their kirana purchases to the apps (Datum Intelligence 2024). The colony beauty parlour is under the same pressure as all the others, with customers booking their beauticians at home via Urban Company, Yes Madam and GetLooks. Shopkeepers and parlour owners in Delhi are all talking about a drop in business of 30-40 per cent (not just at festival time but all year round). Distributors have reported a month-on-month drop of 25-30 per cent in general trade going into Diwali 2024.An unequal contest for small enterprisesThis isn’t a level playing field. A platform with investors behind it can absorb losses for years, can discount heavily and can use data to predict demand. The micro enterprise, on the other hand, has to pay rent, pay wages, and pay for stock out of each month’s turnover. Its real strengths (personal service, credit, local knowledge) are genuine but very difficult to use to get lower prices. The real test is how long it can survive as the market resets around it.AdvertisementAlso Read | What many don’t understand about Himachal: Concrete doesn’t bend, mountains doThere are three reasons why this shift might, in fact, undermine itself.Firstly, customers are also earners. When small business owners give up their businesses, they often re-enter the economy as delivery riders or app-based workers, earning by the task and with no social security. Their incomes are lower and less predictable, and so is their spending. A model that converts stable proprietors into insecure earners is one that gradually shrinks the pool of consumers it relies on.Secondly, low prices are not sustainable. Discounts funded by investor capital can’t go on forever. Growth is already tailing off, with quick commerce sequential growth falling below 20 per cent in Q1 FY26 as the platforms have moved on to profitability. If the neighbourhood alternative has gone by the time the prices go up and the discounts come down, then you’re left with very few options.Thirdly, local money stops circulating locally. A rupee spent at the kirana goes to the kirana owner, the kirana‘s helper and the local wholesaler and a lot of it is spent again in the locality. A rupee spent on an app goes largely to the distant logistics networks and investors. As that local multiplier effect diminishes, the neighbourhoods lose the activity which had sustained all the other small businesses, and the informal credit of the khata is gone with it.More Work, Fewer GuaranteesNITI Aayog gave the figure of 77 lakh gig workers in 2020-21 and is projecting that number to be 2.35 crore by 2029-30 (NITI Aayog 2022). These are real jobs, just not a one-for-one replacement for the small enterprises that are being displaced. You can have all the “unemployment” you like and still have the same number of people working in the economy if you simply replace the owner with a contractor. That doesn’t mean you’ve got the same thing. It means you’ve got less ownership, less security, and less opportunity to build something. That’s precisely why NITI Aayog itself has called for social security cover for gig workers.you may likeFinding a balanceThe answer isn’t to resist innovation but to shape it. A lot of kiranas are now taking orders via WhatsApp, delivering to the doorstep, and are part of the government’s ONDC network. The way forward is through partnerships between the platforms and the kirana stores, with fair competition and better social security for the gig workers. That’s the sort of thing that could actually use technology to expand opportunity rather than reduce it.A market economy is at its very best when innovation is the engine of expanded prosperity rather than the quiet siphoning of the very foundation upon which its own growth is built. Standing at Uncle’s old counter this Diwali, it was very difficult not to wonder whether convenience had been priced a little too low.The writer is assistant professor, Department of Economics, Dr BhimRao Ambedkar College, University of Delhi