Latin Inc
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Sam's Targets Latino Market With 'Más Club'
By National Public Radio
Sam's Club, the warehouse-club sibling of Walmart, has set its sights on the booming Latino market. It has opened an experimental store in Houston with a distinctive Latin accent. It's called Más Club.
Wal-Mart, the retail giant that also runs Sam's Club is trying to grab a bigger slice of the booming Latino market, a market that is expected to top a trillion dollars next year. The latest experiment: a version of Sam's Club with a decidedly Latin accent. Alex Avila, a producer for the NPR show, Latino USA, went to the Houston store, which is dubbed Más Club. Here's what he found.
Close your eyes inside of the Más Club super store just 15 minutes north of downtown Houston, and it isn't hard to imagine yourself in a Mexico retail store like Soriana, a Wal-Mart-like chain from south of the U.S. border. But look around and they're like things much more American, like a Sam's Club. There's a reason for the similarity. Mas Club is the retail giant's latest and boldest step into the American Latino consumer market.
You see bilingual signs with Spanish more prominently displayed. There are bilingual products and food testers. But there's also a Mexican bakery, a cut-to-order meat shop, a banking center and an onsite medical clinic. The store opened August 6th, and already has a café that draws a strong lunch following. You can order a hotdog or a pizza slice like you get in Sam's Club. But you can also order tacos, tamales or a plate of chicken larostisado(ph) with rice and bean.
That Houston would be a test market for the Mas Club concept doesn't surprise many analysts. One-third of the city's population is Latino, and no one ethnic group makes up the city's majority. And around the neighborhood where the store is located, many of the goods and services found in Más Club already exist. A couple of miles away, Fiesta Mart, a Houston-based grocer, offers many of the same products as Más Club. Mexican bakeries, tortilla products and specialty stores are easy to find and almost all of them offer some kind of banking and money transfers.
There may be some risks on taking a known commodity like a Sam's Club store and re-branding it for a niche market. And it's much too early to tell if the Más Club experiment will result in more Más Club super stores. But if it works, the company is eyeing another huge Hispanic market in Arizona. >>> Go to Full Story >>>
LATIN AMERICA: Driving Toward Sustainable Business Advantage
Like many other regions impacted by the global economic crisis, investors and business executives across Latin America have been forced to recalculate expectations of return on investment and corporate earnings.
In recent months, most financial analysts have revised growth expectations for the region downward. A recent survey of more than 100 executives from large, mid-sized and small banks from 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Latin American Bank Federation (FELABAN) finds that most of these respondents expect to feel the impacts of the global financial crisis for one to three years.
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation And Development (OECD), in its Latin American Economic Outlook 2009, acknowledges important challenges for the region, including "revenue generation that relies on volatile non-tax sources and regressive indirect taxes…" and recognizes the key linkage of fiscal policy and development as a key indicator of economic growth within the region's high-potential economies.
The clear consensus among the region's bankers and other business executives is that 2009 will, no doubt, be a challenging year for Latin America and other regional players in the world economy. Yet the same OECD outlook report recognizes steps taken by Latin American governments since the end of the debt crisis of the 1980s that have "reduced deficits, lowered fiscal volatility, increased public expenditure and pioneered fiscal innovations."
Lessons learned from the region's past experiences with debt and currency crises and volatile commodity markets provide Latin American business executives the perspective, experience and agility to adapt to shifting business challenges and the resourcefulness to seek out new opportunities for business growth. While the business community in some parts of the region remains in need of political and economic stability, there remains a significant growth story to tell.
Long overshadowed by the explosive growth of Asian economies, Latin America continues to reveal its market potential even amid the turbulence of the global economic dynamic...
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