Andorinha expands the area, against the hypermarkets
Valor Econômico 09/30/10
While hypermarkets are losing revenue and reducing the sales area to recover profitability, a supermarket almost 20 km from São Paulo downtown live a different reality. In the Horto Florestal´s neighborhood, in the northern region of the capital, Andorinha is in renovation: all the support stores that were in front of the cashiers were removed, making room for the expansion of the sales area from 5.5 to 6.6 square meters.Until the beginning of 2011, the number of cashiers of Andorinha will jump from 84 to 107 - a standard hypermarket has from 3 to 4 thousand square meters and from 30 to 50 cashiers. And the earnings, which last year was of R$ 234. 9 million (US$ 119.2 million), should reach R$ 300 million (US$ 176.5 million) until December, almost 30% more. What is the secret? "Andorinha is a hypermarket that did not lose the feel of a grocery store of the neighborhood", said Amauri Gouveia, operating director of the company founded by his father in 1974. At that time, the warehouse was under operating in 232 square meters with three cashiers at the same address, between the Vaud street and Parada Pinto avenue.
Today the building is over 110 thousand square meters and includes a mall with 80 stores (whither the store owners, which were in front of the cashiers, were transferred), with wine cellar, a beauty parlor, post office, a unit of Magazine Luiza, among others. The mall was opened at the end of last year, with investments of R$ 20 million (US$ 10.2 million). In the garage, with 1.48 million vacancies, Andorinha built a tunnel under the road connecting the two buildings.
Despite the presence of other three major supermarkets within a radius of 2,5 thousand meters, nearly 35 thousand people attend Andorinha every day, administered by Amauri Gouveia and his two brothers, Adilson and Alécio Gouveia. The three started working at the company when they were 14. Amauri, after starting as a packer went to help at the butcher shop. His experience in the meat sector began to change the supermarket in the early '80s. "I started selling sliced oxtail. From five bags of 20 kilos per week that we sold, we moved to 50", he remembers.
From then on that the brothers began to try to anticipate desires and solutions that could facilitate the customer's life. That's because the store still has packers so far. They pack the frozen products in bags of different color from the normal ones. "The perishable products go in yellow bags and the regular items on white ones. Thus, the housewife who do the shopping in a hurry before going to work, get home and does not need to fumble from bag in bag what she has to put in the refrigerator", says Gouveia.
Following this philosophy, Andorinha is one of the few supermarkets where you can, for example, find egg white sold separately, packaged in plastic bottles, after pasteurized. In the delicatessen area, the customer does not need to stand in line for sliced ham with his/her cart: right next to this area there is a kind of parking lot for them. The old coffee grinder - retired in almost all supermarkets - at Andorinha is still working. Suggestions from customers are now also welcome. One of them was selling ground chicken breast fillet. "It's one of the successes in the meat area", said Gouveia.