Argentinian newspaper 2001 reports that international high-end retailers, such as Escada and stores owned by LVMH, are vacating their shops in Buenos Aires’s Alvear avenue due to the latest currency restrictions.
Most prominently, shops can no longer accept payment in US dollars, but the article also mentions that “numerous business restrictions” impede doing business.
Additionally, other retailers like The Gap and Apple are opening shop in Santiago, Chile, which has a much more welcoming business environment. The Santiago Apple store will be Latin America’s third, after Mexico and Brazil. This nearly amounts to an indictment of the Argentinian government’s business policy, since Argentina’s economy is South America’s third-largest. However, Chile’s competitiveness and economic index surpassed Argentina’s years ago.
Luis Vuitton, a favorite brand of president Cristina Fernández, is gone, but, fear not, she’ll always have Paris.
If you believe that I have some ocean front property in Colorado I be glad to sell you.
What is it you don’t believe, S?
That Kenzo, Emporio Armani, YSL, and Escada left?
Or that The Gap set up shop in Santiago, Chile?
Too many times, Socialist “revolutions”, whether via coups or simple administration changes via elections, are given credit for saving a nation’s economy when in fact it’s simply the presence of authorities willing to gut and eliminate old time corruption that really fixes things. When socialists replace those old time corruptors with their own, the country slides backwards again. Cuba from the advent of Castro’s reign is a good example of this, with guerilla adventurism thrown in on top.
Argentina? Well, it appears to have gotten over the banana republic sort of history from the 50’s and 60’s, and that’s good. But it seems as though it’s still going to learn the lesson about socialism that many western countries have already stumbled on. Losing sets of retailers in and of itself isn’t that big a deal, but losing them because of the business environment the government fosters is. It makes those losses symptomatic of a larger problem. And it’s just that the high end retailers were the bellweathers of what’s to come.