Geraldine mitelman
04/08/2021 15:23
Clarín.com
Zonal
Updated 04/08/2021 3:23 PM
In the
Unicenter
de Martínez, as rarely, thousands of clients throughout the day filled the premises of Falabella, a firm that is leaving the country and began to say goodbye to its main headquarters in Capital and Greater Buenos Aires.
In the iconic shopping mall on the Pan-American Highway, the fragments of goodbye have opposite ends.
On the one hand, people went en masse and made
long lines
to empty the shelves and mannequins with the unusual prices for the closure.
But on the opposite side is the crisis that remains both for the
owners of the shopping center and for the workers of the clothing brand
.
Falabella's traditional North American "mall" look was transformed into a large warehouse with packed boxes.
For Unicenter, the gap that Falabella leaves is very complex to recover: a
mega store that occupies two floors
, very difficult to pay for in its entirety, unless they have to restructure the space in order to subdivide it into many businesses.
In addition, this Wednesday the employees, vendors, cashiers and cleaners of the Chilean firm
complained in the
shopping
corridors themselves
that they are pressuring them to accept voluntary withdrawals and that the company does not clarify what will happen to those who do not reach an agreement.
Last February, Falabella decided to close its stores in Mendoza, Córdoba and San Juan.
At the same time, the group of Chilean capitals reorients its strategy to abandon the local market, afflicted by the lack of sales and the crisis of the pandemic.
This week, in a brief statement, the Chilean capital group revealed that "in the context of the plan that Falabella is carrying out to make its operation in Argentina sustainable, the company will close the department stores located in
Rosario
, the
Unicenter shopping mall
and in the
Florida pedestrian street
in the City of Buenos Aires ".
The panorama today at
Unicenter was the antithesis of what the second wave
of the pandemic
demands
.
There were lines in turns and people crowded together waiting to take the clothes on sale.
In batches,
queues of 10 people
awaited their dose of alcohol, rolling their eyes everywhere.
Is that in the largest Unicenter store, which announced 24 hours ago that it will leave the country, the
posters with the legend liquidation
are hung "for you" (so they say) in all sectors.
The discounts were 30%, 40%, or 50% in the women's store (the most overflowing), children, men, appliances and linen.
Long lines of customers sought to take away Falabella's low-cost products.
They were available from modern pots for $ 590, bath mats for $ 900 and winter sweaters, wool or more delicate, for $ 2,000.
Most products can also be paid in three interest-free installments.
Falabella, who always knew how to take care of its
“mall” aesthetics
comparable to those of the United States,
now looks like a warehouse where cardboard boxes and pallets are confused
with packages of Egyptian cotton sheets.
The closing date is April 31st.
"If not before", they say in the place.
The workers' claim is heard almost as much as the people who wait to buy.
“We are lost, they offer us money and we want to continue working.
We are around 500 workers who would be disabled.
We have been resisting voluntary withdrawals since September 2020. And now we have ten days to decide.
The worst of all is that on the 14th, Human Resources ceases to function in the store, ”said YM, an
employee of almost a decade
at the company.
As rarely in the Unicenter of Panamericana, most of the customer bags are from Falabella.
The chain, an emblem of department stores, landed in the country at the beginning of the 90s and had 10 points of sale with that brand, another 7 Sodimac and CMR, its loyalty card.
AC
Look also
The deep crisis of an iconic Panamericana shopping mall: "Another quarantine would destroy us"
Falabella closes its last 3 stores and says goodbye to Argentina
