A P100,000 freebie

It’s easy to believe that any one of Lucio Co’s PureGold supermarket outlets can gross P10 million a day. On its first day, PureGold-Valenzuela had to close its doors four times because there wasn’t any room anymore to maneuver the shopping carts.

Mr. Co’s style of doing business is pure Divisoria. Buy in bulk and sell lower than everybody else. While this strategy means very small margins, all those ten-centavo here and a peso earned there are multiplied by the sheer number of customers.

So liquid is Mr. Co that he is said to be in the final stages of buying a hotel in the Bay Area.

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Did you know 1: While the official price per square meter is about P2,000 to P2,500 in Laguna industrial parks, negotiating can bring the prize down to as low as P75 (yes, double digits) per square meter.

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Did you know 2: This beverage company seems to have a larger than usual turnaround rate among its distributors. The talk is many distributors can no longer afford the cost of doing business.

You see, the distributors are told to hand over additional collateral for more orders they have to accept (even if they have not yet sold their current stock).

These forced orders are booked as sales. Naturally, the window dressing makes the company’s wonder kids look terribly good before their shareholders.

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Did you know 3: Now, the businessman’s style of doing business is best described in polite society as, uh, street smart. Rich even by world standards, he believes that people are primarily motivated by greed.

Example? He likes to gift his friends and business associates with pretty little things. These girls can name their price, say P100,000 for the night, and the businessman wouldn’t blink. In their presence, he signs checks payable to their names and the amount agreed upon. When these girls try to encash their earnings the next day, they are told the checks are invalid. You see, the checks do not carry the businessman’s signature.

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Did you know 4: There’s a shoe design contest initiated by Marikina Mayor Lourdes Carlos-Fernando that will send the winners to Milan, Italy. (In terms of design, the Philippines likes to style itself as the "Milan of Asia").

The contest, which will separately judge entries of students and of professional designers, has four categories: casual and evening wear for both men and women.

As everybody knows, Marikina has gotten into the Guinness Book of Records as having the world’s biggest shoe. Now, Marides Carlos-Fernando and the town’s shoemakers association led by Charter International Inc. vice-president Jose Enriquez want to be known as makers of world class shoes.