Informal Street Trading Activity by Gujarati Migrants in Kolkata:Applicability of the Hoteling Rule and Reilly’s Law

The present study is an effort to explore the female dominated informal business of street trading activity by Gujarati migrants in West Bengal. In this, a two-fold transaction is observed in which exchanges of used clothes against new utensils with middle-class housewives is a barter activity while the re-selling of the used clothes to consumers of low-income group and petty traders is purely a monetary transaction. In other cases of re-selling or re-cycling activities which are commonly observed such as old newspapers or old furniture - buying and selling involve purely monetary transaction with two dispersed sets of individuals. However, the second-hand garments market dominated by the Gujarati migrants in West Bengal inherits both barter and monetary transactions in the two sides. The success of this female-dominated trading activity has explored their inherent business idea and skill successfully which has entitled them decision-making ability within the family. The present paper is a mere attempt to investigate whether the Harold Hoteling’s “Principle of Minimum Differentiation” and William J. Reilly’s “Law of Retail Gravitation” are able to explain the spatial clustering of the informal sales outlets of this particular street-trading activity in Kolkata. The micro-level field surveys, sampling design and data analysis of the study conducted are based upon the standard model approach to avoid spatial homogeneity.