Gift for Mexico

Rich and sprawling Sears, Roebuck & Co. was embarking on its most ambitious foreign venture. The No. 1 U.S. mail order-chain casually let the news leak out that it had bought a $516,000 site in Mexico City and was planning to build a store on it.

The news struck among Mexico's retail and mail-order merchants like a hawk among chickens. They have no marketing and merchandising methods to approach the slick, fast moving Sears operation.

The select class of Mexican luxury customers, which can afford the customary creaky service and stiff markets, seemed only faintly interested in Sears' coming. And the largest group of Mexican customers, the submerged, perpetually broke, factory-and farm-working three-fourths of the country, didn't seem to care a rap.

But they will, if Sears can manage. Following its U.S. pattern, Sears will launch an unprecedented low-price selling campaign aimed right at Mexico's mighty masses. Items on the new market:

P: Mexico City, the sixth largest city on the continent, has only one five-and-ten, and no mail-order competition to compare with Sears;

P: Most Mexican merchants buy by the box and crate, as against the Sears trainload, and sell at the highest possible markups;

P: Unlike Mexican-owned houses, Sears is prepared to risk several million dollars on the chance that the new wave of industrialization will lift Mexican buying power to exploitable level.

Prime mover of the Sears experiment is forthright, pink-cheeked General Robert Elkington Wood, 65-year-old Sears board chairman. An aggressive merchandiser, West Pointer Wood has long dreamed of chancing the Mexican market, but risks have always tempered his enthusiasm. They still do. Said Bob Wood last week: "Hell, this is strictly . . . a gamble . . . [but] we're hoping it will be a success and then we can go on and expand in Latin America."

Familiar Patterns. To house its second international venture (the first: a store in Havana), Sears plans to build a new million-dollar building with a bargain basement, and a typical Sears fac,ade--to be open for business probably early in 1947. The store will have a U.S. manager and Mexican personnel. The site, as with most Sears stores, is comfortably out of Mexico City's high-rent district.

To build up its mail-order business in the adobe villages of the plains and the distant mountain and jungle towns, Sears salesmen will probably follow the trail blazed by sellers of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. (N.J.). In many of the remote huts of farmers who still labor with oxen and wooden plows are ancient Singers now passed from mother to daughter as a family heirloom. With such people as these Sears men will leave their revered catalogue, an artifact they hope will come to mean as much in Mexico as it does in the rural U.S.

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