Business fair at Kamalitto reincarnated
Could be better with better tax regimes
by Ruel Johnson
Guyana Chronicle
March 21, 2004
MARCOS Gomes is a travelling man. A native of Parana, the third southernmost state in Brazil, Gomes started his travels at the age of 19. He worked in Venezuela, French Guiana and Paraguay, at a variety of jobs – including a stint as a mining equipment salesman – before settling down and opening up a shop in Suriname’s teeming capital, Paramaribo. He spent five years there, running his Brazilian dry goods store, Kamalitto.
But the competition from other Brazilian entities was to increase, which led to the stagnation of his own business. Gomes decided to look elsewhere to set up shop.
“Many people talked about this place,” he told the Sunday Chronicle Thursday in English, a language that, admittedly, he has not quite yet mastered. “Many Brazilians came here and make a living. I come to try it,” the itinerant merchant said.
It was on the basis of this bit of information that the young entrepreneur closed up Kamalitto, moved to Guyana and, in a little less than a year, opened up what one might call its Georgetown reincarnation.
Interestingly enough, Kamalitto is situated on Light Street, between Regent and Robb, in an area that may be considered Georgetown’s own Centro do Brasil. The shop is in close proximity to the Brazilian restaurant, Pepper’s, and Rockies Hotel, which has a clientele that is almost strictly made up of Brazilians working in the mining industry in Guyana’s vast interior.
Now two years on, Gomes’ store has moved from selling mainly cosmetics to clothing and footwear. According to Marcos, although business did not quite prove the goldmine it was predicted to be, business has been fair.
“Not too slow; not too bad; depending on the period….like Father’s Day….and Mother’s Day and sometimes ‘Mash’”, he said. “The best period is Christmas and New Year.”
Today, in addition to his calling upon his younger brother, Clever Gomes, from their family home in Parana, to help out, he also employs two young women: Pamela has been with Kamalitto since the store opened, while Julie has been there for about one year.
Footwear makes up, both in terms of value and space, the larger share of Kamalitto’s stocks. Loafers, high-heeled shoes, slippers, pegged football boots with brand names like Rossanfort, Hipicos, Cyda Costa, Futsa Randall, Ipanema Lugano and Samello, line the walls of Gomes’ store. Racks in the centre of the store display clothes, from lingerie to sportswear. Most of his stock is bought from the Brazilian city of Manaus, and transported overland via Boa Vista and Lethem, to Georgetown.
One of the biggest barriers to doing business, especially with Guyanese customers, came in the form of communication. The little English that he had learned in school had to be supplemented with terms he picked up in the street. The two salesgirls helped with interacting with Guyanese customers, but then another problem came when the girls had to interact with the Brazilians who frequented the store.
With Gomes’ encouragement, both Pamela and Julie began attending Portuguese classes offered by the Centre of Brazilian Studies at the Brazilian Embassy located on up-market Church Street, once referred to by locals as ‘Diplomatic Row’ because of the proliferation of embassies in its environs. Currently, both young women speak reasonably conversational Portuguese, although Pamela has had a longer exposure to the language and is, because of this, more adept at it than her co-worker.
Jokes Marcos: “She speaks it better than Brazilians.”
Sunday Chronicle asked Gomes whether he felt that more Brazilian entrepreneurs would come to Guyana to go into the business of selling goods instead of entering the mining industry.
He says that he sees two main hindrances to Brazilian entrepreneurship in Guyana, this being “the road and the tax.” Some products, he says, carry up to 40 and 50 per cent duty, which, along with high transportation costs, make it quite prohibitive for him to stock certain items, such as clothing, for example. “Shoes,” he says, “is better.”
He believes that the governments of both Brazil and Guyana should sit down and come up with a better tax regime, one comparable to the ones that other CARICOM countries now have with Guyana.
On the issue of safety, Gomes says that although he considers Guyana a nice place, it also a dangerous one. He has been mugged more than once, and both he and the girls concur that the store is the frequent target of shoplifters. Both girls told of one instance where a customer was robbed of all her jewellery by two young louts while standing at the store’s entrance. The girls say that many Brazilians are robbed, primarily of the gold they carry on them.
Julie feels that a fair degree of her employer’s sense of insecurity comes from the fact that he is a relatively new immigrant to this country.
“If I were in his country, I’d probably feel the same way,” she says.
Asked how long he planned staying Guyana, Marcos Gomes was hesitant. “I hope to stay here three years, five years…depends how the business is,” he finally ventured. He adds that if the economy improves, he might even be encouraged to stay on for as long as 25 years.
He says that though he doesn’t know what the future has in store for him, what he does know is that his stay in Guyana is only temporary. Whenever he leaves, he says, he plans going to either of two places, Venezuela or Angola. Angola, a former Portuguese colonial territory in East Africa, only ended a devastating civil war in 2002.