Unique Shopping Markets Cater to Immigrants

Shopping markets are increasingly facing competition from convenience stores, major Super-Walmarts and even other supermarkets. A new supermarket is emerging with a competitive edge in their product mix. They are catering to immigrants with unique ethnic choices and they’re seeing great results.

Trays of beef soup, stuffed chiles and pupusas tantalize the lunch rush at the Supermercados Teloloapan taqueria.

Stacks of fresh tortillas, sandwich bread known as bolillos and sugar-topped sweet breads fill the bakery of the Gulfton-area store. In the butcher’s department, chicken feet, cow tongue and tripe line the display case.

What you won’t find here is the organic produce, soy milk or fresh eclairs sold in the international aisles of some of the big chains.

Neighborhood stores like Teloloapan, La Michoacana Meat Market and Matamoros Meat Market stock their shelves with items that can complete an immigrant’s shopping list.

An excerpt from the story below:

“They know they have to give them what they are looking for, or else they will lose them to a store that is catering to them,” said Lorrie Griffith, editor of the Shelby Report, a Gainesville, Ga.-based publication that follows the grocery business.

Add that marketing smarts to the fact that Harris County’s immigrant population continues to swell, and it’s not difficult to see why these stores have grown into chains in their own right.

Teloloapan, for example, runs nine stores; La Michoacana owns more than 100 in the state; and Matamoros has 11 franchises.

“They’re the logical extension of the development we’re having through immigration,” Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist, said about the growth of the bodegas and supermercados.

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