IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/entsoc/v1y2000i04p683-692_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Marketing in Mexico: Sears, Roebuck Company, J. Walter Thompson, and the Culture of North American Commerce in Mexico City during the 1940s

Author

Listed:
  • Moreno, Julio E.

Abstract

When the Sears, Roebuck Company opened its first store in Mexico City on February 28, 1947, an observer reported that the crowds on opening day were generally “well behaved, but impatient; they wanted to buy! buy! and buy!” Saleswomen panicked “as a sea of hands thrust pesos toward them, into their pockets, into their blouses, anywhere—just to complete a purchase.” Customers not only refused to leave at the end of the day; they stayed outside the store after closing. They jammed the street at night trying to look through the windows. On Saturday, two days after the store opened, Sears observers reported that customers outside the store screamed, “Let us in! Let us in! They waved money at us. They tried to sneak in through the back doors, and they cut the ropes guarding the entrance.” About 110,000 guests visited the store during its first three days of operation. So many customers visited Sears during its first two weeks in Mexico City that, according to John F. Gallagher, the vice-president of Sears' Latin American operations, “There were employees and lady customers who fainted due to the heat, agitation, and the crowdedness in the store.”

Suggested Citation

  • Moreno, Julio E., 2000. "Marketing in Mexico: Sears, Roebuck Company, J. Walter Thompson, and the Culture of North American Commerce in Mexico City during the 1940s," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(4), pages 683-692, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:1:y:2000:i:04:p:683-692_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1467222700002196/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paswan, Audhesh & Pineda, María de los Dolores Santarriaga & Ramirez, Francisco Carlos Soto, 2010. "Small versus large retail stores in an emerging market--Mexico," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(7), pages 667-672, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:1:y:2000:i:04:p:683-692_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eso .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.