Indian Retail Stores suck big time

Following are some of my views on Indian retail outlets. Mainly the departmental stores like Spencers, Reliance fresh, more(formerly Trinetra). I (probably along with at least 10 more) have bad experiences at stores in two cities Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Queues at the cash counter:-
I typically see a long queue in each of the counters. Some of the times, I even grabbed all the things I needed, and wait for some time in the queue and then just put all the things back and just get out of the stores. These queues make me reluctant to go to these stores. The reasons I observed are as follows.

1. There is not enough change. As u can't hold(as per the cashier's claim) a customer bill aside without payment and feed another customer's bill, all the customers need to wait till the current customer gets paid with his change.
2. Credit/Debit cards don't work due to the payment machines and their connections not working properly. I feel its a simple problem, which can be solved to some extent, by dividing the counters into two types, one is to pay by cash only and the other is to pay by credit/debit cards only. I don't understand why outlet guys fail to implement this simple system. I think this system is implemented in railway reservation counters.
3. In some of the outlets, there will be two queues, one to get the vegetables etc weighed and the bar code for the weight is attached, and the other is to pay the bill for these weighed vegetables along with the other packed stuff. Some people forget to do this, and they just block the queue for some time. This is solved in Reliance fresh by making everything (billing,weighing) at one queue.

Quality of the goods:-

1. I typically find expired items in some of the retail outlets. I even told the store guys about these, but there is no actions took place. I don't think many of us check the expiry dates for packed items, unless it is milk bread like thing.
   
2. The vegetables/fruits are at least as old as 5 to 10 days. I really don't understand why do they name the stores as 'fresh'.

Unavailability of items:-
Almost 50% of the times I don't find what I want at these stores. Main reason I could see here is the pathetic inventory management and demand forecasting systems.

1. In almost all the retails outlets, some goods are never seen. For example Heritage fresh does not have Mealmaker(not sure of the spelling though). Surprisingly the store people also don't know what is mealmaker.
2. Typically in Spencers I don't find the basic items such as rise, salt. For other items such as diet coke etc, you can't even think of the availability at Spensers.
   
3. Some times, the items which are bought in small quantities will not be available in the small quantities. For example the masala items, which are usually bought in 100s of grams are found in half kg and one kg packs.

I feel the reasons for all these failures at a higher level could be because of the ignorance of the outlets by the actual retail chain owners such as Reliance, Spencers once the outlets are franchised. Look to see a new retail chain to come up, which would clearly address the above issues.