ed savings of billions of dollars to retailers (Rankin, 2000, p. 17). The United States has long been a strong retail environment, and although the country is experiencing a slowdown from its economic boom of the 1990s, European retailers can expect to continue to see good opportunity here, particularly in boutique-type chains (the discount market in the United States is dominated by chains such as Wal-Mart which participate on an international level, but this market has yet to be successfully penetrated by international hyper markets).
Retailers in Mexico recognize that this is a young country, with 23 percent of the population between the ages of 14 and 24 years of age ("Youth Fever," 2000, p. 40). Brand names are particularly popular in Mexico, and increased globalization means that young consumers in particular are familiar with brands from around the world.
Retailers can take advantage of this brand awareness and work with manufacturers in co-operative advertising agreements. Nestle, for example, ran a promotion on the Internet where visitors to a Web site promoting the manufacturer's ice cream products could win tickets to a Ricky Martin concert. Although Internet penetration Mexico lags behind European countries (at only four percent of households), Internet users are overwhelmingly young. Thus the Nestle site generated more than 1,000 "hits" per day within its first week, although it is not clear how many of those visitors also tried the company's ice cream ("Youth Fever," 2000, p. 40).
Pacific Rim
For many years, the difference in cultures meant that retailing was very different from one country to another even when both were ostensibly free markets. In Asia, commerce was based on a retail trade characterized by small businesses that were often family owned. In many cases, the shops themselves were not shops in the European sense of being housed in a building, but instead were located ...