A small-city dark store, by the numbers
Mandya.
One Blinkit dark store, ninety-five kilometres south of Bangalore. About eight thousand SKUs on shelf, and roughly one-sixth the tracked revenue of a flagship Bangalore store. The smallest store in its cluster — and a study in what quick commerce looks like once you leave the metros.
By the numbers
What the store carries, and where it sits in the cluster.
Total tracked SKUs
Cumulative SKUs we've seen on shelf at the Mandya dark store.
Active SKUs monthly
~27% of catalog actually sells in a typical month.
Revenue index
Mandya's tracked revenue, relative to Indiranagar (=100).
Cluster rank
Smallest store in the Mysuru cluster + Bangalore reference set.
A note on revenue: category coverage isn't uniform across stores, so we show tracked revenue indices rather than absolute figures. Indiranagar sits at the top of the set and anchors the scale at 100.
The catalog
Half the shelf is packaged food. The other half is mostly soap, shampoo, and ice cream.
Personal care leads on SKU count. Cooking oils, biscuits, ice cream and detergents follow. Electronics and toys are present, but thin.
The shelf, broken down.
Top sub-categories by cumulative SKU count, coloured by their retail bucket.
The long tail
Two thirds of the catalog earns nothing in a given month.
About 1,966 SKUs at Mandya sold at least one unit in our clean-day sample. Roughly 5,800 didn't. The ones that do sell aren't especially concentrated either — you need 250 SKUs to cover half of revenue.
For a small-city store this is a healthy distribution — the revenue isn't held up by a handful of items. But it does mean the assortment carries a long tail of slow movers: ~73% of the catalog doesn't turn in a typical month.
The peer set
Smallest in the cluster, by some distance.
Stacked against the six other Blinkit stores in the Mysuru cluster plus two Bangalore reference stores. Catalog depth on the left; tracked revenue index (Indiranagar = 100) on the right.
Index reflects revenue from categories we track. Coverage varies across stores, so actual revenue gaps are likely narrower than the indices suggest — particularly for smaller stores.
Where the money comes from
As you walk from Mandya to Indiranagar, the food share melts away.
Each row is one store, with tracked GMV split across four retail buckets. Six out of every ten rupees we see at Mandya are packaged food. At Indiranagar, just three.
of Mandya's GMV. Almost double Indiranagar's 31% share.
at Mandya vs 49% at Indiranagar — no fans, monitors, or Fire TV sticks selling here.
remarkably stable across the cluster. The most format-independent category.
On the shelf
Ghee. Ice cream. Oil. Detergent. Repeat.
The fifteen biggest-selling items at Mandya, by relative revenue (top SKU = 100). Notice the rhythm: cooking oils, ice cream tubs, atta, detergent — with a small premium intrusion via protein oats.
The top of the table is almost entirely mass-market essentials. Nandini ghee takes the #1 slot — a Karnataka co-operative dairy, deeply local. Amul shows up five times in the top fifteen, all ice cream tubs.
Yoga Bar and Pintola protein oats are the only premium intrusions — a small but real foothold for D2C health brands even in a small-city store.
Brand concentration
Indiranagar is a winner-takes-most market. Mandya is a fatter middle.
How many brands does it take to make up half of a store's revenue? At Indiranagar — ten. A single brand alone does almost 16% of the GMV (premium electronics). Mandya needs 53 brands to cover half, and the top brand is just 5.8%.
| Store | Top brand share | Brands → 50% GMV | Brands → 80% GMV | Total brands sold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indiranagar | 15.7% | 10 | 146 | 903 |
| Mandya | 5.8% | 53 | 179 | 582 |
| Alanahalli | 2.9% | 65 | 205 | 717 |
| Gokulam | 2.9% | 78 | 258 | 1002 |
| Kuvempunagar | 2.2% | 83 | 266 | 1020 |
| E-City | 3.5% | 84 | 286 | 1034 |
| JP Nagar | 2.5% | 87 | 276 | 940 |
| Ansaar | 2.4% | 89 | 282 | 930 |
| Vijay Nagar | 2.3% | 89 | 279 | 961 |
Indiranagar's top brand share (15.7%) is a single big-ticket electronics brand doing outsized GMV per unit. Mandya sells fewer brands overall (582 vs ~1,000 in core Mysuru), but those brands share the pie more evenly — closer to a kirana-style basket than a flagship lifestyle store.
The takeaway
What a small-city dark store looks like, from the inside.
A packaged-FMCG outlet, not a grocer.
Half the catalog and 60% of tracked revenue is FMCG food. Personal care and cleaning hold the other third. Lifestyle categories barely register.
Smallest in the cluster, by a real margin.
Tracked revenue at ~16 on a scale where Indiranagar = 100. The Mysuru core stores cluster between 47 and 99. Even Alanahalli, the next-smallest, runs ~50% larger than Mandya.
Catalog is wide; depth is shallow.
~8,000 tracked SKUs, but only 27% sell in a month. The store carries a long tail of slow movers.
Local champions are visible in the data.
Nandini ghee is the #1 SKU. Arun ice cream (a South Indian brand) sits in the top 15. Quick commerce in Mandya is still a local-brand market.
The shape of Blinkit Mandya is a fair read on what quick commerce looks like at the lower end of the city-tier curve — an essentials-first catalog with a thin aspirational layer, and almost no contribution from lifestyle categories.