Commercial Boulevard at Happy Acres on the East Coast Demerara appears at first to be an ideal setting for a quiet, gated community. The appearance is deceptive. Travelling from the city you enter the Boulevard at the corner immediately east of the Grand Coastal Hotel.
A few moments later, on your right, you arrive at a neat, continuous edifice with the name Mekdeci printed prominently on the eastern wall. The signs of a commercial enterprise are unmistakable.
Inside, the spacious, neatly arranged showrooms display a range of appliances………air conditioning units, electrical and electronic appliances, generators, vehicle tyres medical equipment. Mekdeci’s, unmistakably, is not modelled after the conventional downtown retail outlet.
The showroom’s layout, with its volumes of various products, resembles a Warehouse Club, popular in the United States for the wide variety of products that they offer and their accommodation of both retail bargain hunters and business owners. Warehouse Clubs are able to keep prices low on account of the absence in many instances of the ‘frills’ that manifest themselves in conventional retail stores. For that reason too, Warehouse Clubs are able to keep prices as close as possible to the floor.
Andrew Mekdeci, co-owner of Mekdeci’s confirms that the two year-old establishment is, in fact, modelled along the lines of a Warehouse Club. The enterprise is in its testing phase, still in the process of introducing product lines, analyzing product acceptance and monitoring sales volume to determine, he says, “where we go from here.” It may, Mekdeci says, lead to a second outlet, downtown, though plans for such a move are far from ‘firmed up.’ For the moment, he is satisfied that the Commercial Boulevard Sales Centre and Warehouse is holding its own.
The Mekdeci model takes careful account of customer behaviour, its major product lines reflecting a departure from the conventional retail outlet. Retail outlets are designed to take account of impulse buying. “No one buys an air conditioning unit on impulse,” Mekdeci says. What Mekdeci’s has done, therefore, is to create its own niche in the local market…………..car dealers, resellers, building contractors, installation engineers and other commercial enterprises are among its main target customers.
The Mekdeci business model takes account too of the mobility of its target market. Its customers, Its customers, by the very nature of their own pursuits, are highly mobile which mobility includes the ability to take advantage of the facility of electronic shopping.
The growth of the enterprise coincides with what Andrew Mekdeci says is a corresponding expansion in the Guyana economy. He believes that the country’s economy is doing “extremely well,” citing the volume of construction across the country…..homes, businesses and renovations” as one of the more visible indicators of economic progress. The Mekdeci business model seems set to thrive on that growth.
