HOUSTON, TX – In an effort to expand its Hispanic customer base, Walmart opened its first Supermercado in Houston last week and plans to open a Hispanic warehouse club — Mas Club, patterned after Sam’s Club — later this summer, the Houston Chronicle reports.
The store’s opening was greeted with large crowds, and Walmart plans to open another supermercado in Phoenix later this month.
“I think it’s about being more relevant to the community you serve,” said Jose Antonio Fernandez, Walmart vice president of business development. “Especially in Houston, the demand for Hispanic products has been growing for us.”
Walmart converted a former 39,000-square foot Neighborhood Market store into the new Supermercado store. It got rid of the ethnic aisle, reduced the frozen foods section, and stocked fewer peanut brands, an unpopular food with Latinos. It enlarged its tres-leches-stocked bakery, added a taco kitchen, and erected signs in Spanish.
“I think this is a natural evolution of what we’ve been doing for years,” Fernandez said.
The Hispanic market spends $984 billion annually, a figure that is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2013. Lower-income shoppers — including Hispanics — are the nation’s fasted-growing income group and will spend $84 billion in the next decade on incremental purchases.