Brazilian traders with national product stores established in Manhattan, New York, report that this World Cup gave them the biggest profit in the history of their businesses. They experience a mix of happiness and tiredness.
“We traders are like that: when we see a shopping boom coming, we celebrate a little, but then we start to worry”, jokes Marcela Ferreira, owner of Búzios from Bahia, which calls itself the oldest Brazilian store in the United States and is located on 45th Street, in the tangle of what until a few years ago was known as Little Brazil, with several businesses in the country.
It is necessary to carefully prepare the stock and publicity of the products. Ferreira says that his revenue doubled in the first week of the World Cup, which featured Brazil’s debut in the New York Metropolitan Region, at the MetLife Stadium. And not only that: this was her highest revenue since owning the store, 20 years ago.
Further north of Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, is Brazilian Market NYC, a store with a similar proposition and a café with Brazilian ready-made foods. The establishment has been there for three years and also had its highest revenue during this World Cup. An employee describes Sheet that the store no longer had anywhere to stock products, and that everything was sold in the first week.
The search for services offered by Brazilians also grew. One of the oldest and best-known Brazilian beauty salons in New York City, Maria Bonita Salon in the Soho area, has also seen an increase in demand. The establishment says that its revenue has grown by 35% since the start of the World Cup.
Demand at the establishment grew, particularly for hairdressing and manicure services and also for services provided in hotels for Brazilian women who came to watch the World Cup. “Our difference continues to be the combination of the quality of Brazilian services with the hospitality that characterizes our culture”, says the salon in a statement.
Brazilian stores in Manhattan sell a little bit of everything that reminds us of Brazil in the imagination of foreigners and also Brazilians who live abroad.
In addition to the national team t-shirts and the large and small Brazilian flags for the World Cup, there are routinely Havaianas flip-flops, bikinis, “feijoada kit” (with the meat already cut to be just mixed with the beans), cheese bread, coxinha, beauty products, coffee, cream cheese.
At Ferreira’s store, she says, the public is a mix of Brazilians and foreigners, and it is not possible to say who frequents the establishment the most. And the report confirms: in around 1 hour at the store, six very different people or groups entered to buy products.
There was everything from a family of Haitians who once lived in Brazil and wanted clothes in the country’s colors, to a Brazilian who bought cream cheese to make a casserole for his foreign boyfriend who never ate the product, to an American who lived in Brazil for ten years and went looking for products he was fond of, especially… Engov.
“This little mix here is unique,” he jokes. The Brazilian product originally indicated to treat headaches and allergies but commonly used against hangovers is a hit among foreigners.
Although in the USA you can find its ingredients separately, such as aluminum hydroxide, caffeine, acetylsalicylic acid and pyrilamine maleate, in other compositions, there is not a single tablet that mixes all of these. The product is a “bestseller” in Brazilian stores.
The peak in demand occurred on the Thursday and Friday before Brazil’s debut, on Saturday, June 13, in the World Cup.
Purchases, however, remain high. Many Brazilian tourists who traveled to the World Cup left New York for Philadelphia or Miami, where the Brazilian team is playing in this first phase. It is possible that the team will return to New York, depending on their performance. And then it will be Brazilian traders’ turn to prepare… again.
