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Following suit after many other prominent startups incurring loses lately, Gurugram-based online grocery delivery startup, Grofers decided to revoke the job offers of 67 students. Riled at having their dreams broken, these students refused to let things slide and filed a case against the online grocery delivery portal.

Here’s the entire story.

Despite raising decent funding in its funding rounds, Grofers seemed to have been incurring huge losses on a daily basis for some time now. Founder and CEO, Albinder Dhindsa claimed the startup to have been losing over Rupees 20 lakh per day. This led to them closing shop in 9 cities, including, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Kochi, Ludhiana, Mysore, Nashik, Rajkot and Visakhapatnam. Though, they claimed to have done so to divert manpower to more promising areas as they claim to be getting most of their orders from cities like Mumbai and Delhi.

Though this caused some dissention in the employees at the time, it was mostly internal, due to transfer in area of operation, it was dealt with and operation resumed.

But, earlier this year, in its hiring rounds, Grofers hired many graduates from all over India. The students, after receiving confirmation on June 27th, came to Gurugram to make preparations to start their new life at a promising job. They were supposed to begin work from July1st. But, just three days later, on June 30th, the employment offers of 67 of these students were revoked without any prior notice.

HR head at Grofers said the retraction was brought into effect “owing to market conditions and changes which affect their business”.

Further, in their retraction letter, they promised to share the students’ resumes with headhunters, consultants, alumni networks and senior members to help them score other job opportunities. But, the students are not ready to believe them and see no forthcoming compensations.

This incited major dissention. The students, having once gotten placement couldn’t sit for placement rounds for other companies. So, they found themselves feeling absolutely cheated with nowhere to go. About 20 of these students decided to get the authorities involved. They filed an FIR against the Gurugram-based startup with Myadvo, a Delhi-based legal-tech startup. They sent a notice regarding the same to Grofers but they are yet to receive a reply.

For further details, you can refer to this all-inclusive article about Grofers’ deceit.
These incited students took to social media to vent their anger.

“The last date to reply to the legal notice sent to Grofers is this Friday. However, they have not taken any step and have not replied to the notice yet. Also, there has been no response to students’ calls and emails. Plus, Grofers has also turned its face from giving the earlier compensation offered to the students. The students are now in a fix and have no option other than to adopt the legal route,” told, Myadvo, a Delhi-based legal-tech startup handling the case on the students’ side.

The online grocery ordering business seems to have been witnessing a downfall lately. Many other such ventures have had to close shop because of dwindling business. In April, one such venture, Pepper-Tap had to shut down because of the very reason and is now planning to pivot to logistics. Startup giants like Flipkart and Ola were forced to shut down their grocery delivery services due to the reduction in market pool.

Further, such case of retraction of employment offers is not new in the startup world. Earlier, Flipkart delayed the joining dates of some newly hired employees from IIM, causing a lot of resentment among the latter. This issue was solved when the Quality Council of India stepped in to provide them erstwhile employment.

All in all, these dicey promises and retraction of offers by startups have blacklisted them to many educational institutes which shy away from inviting them for their recruitment process. Many are considering banning startups from this process completely. With such insecurity, graduates are looking more into job opportunities in well-established MNCs and deflecting from startups in contrast to the scenario of a couple years ago.

With such rising instability in the startup world, the need for due diligence is more than ever. Seems like, not only the startup owners but even the prospective employees now need proper legal assistance at every step.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.