Pricesmart Jamaica has reported annual sales of US$94 million or twice as much as the company anticipated would be the capacity when it decided to establish a membership club on Red Hills Road, Kingston, back in 2003.

The growth in sales, which is also accompanied by long lines at the country’s only membership retail club, is now driving the retailer to seek another location in Kingston to open up its second club.

“Yogi bear used to say some very funny things that when you thought about it, some of them actually made sense. He used to say ‘nobody goes there anymore, it’s too busy’. We are concerned about that. People ask are you going to open another one; we have been looking for awhile and it is possible and we hope to,” Senior Vice-President of Pricesmart Legal Affairs for the Caribbean and Latin America, Ernesto Grijalva said during the Amcham Trade and Investment Breakfast Forum on Friday.

He, however, told the

Jamaica Observer that while the club has been looking for the right property at the right location and the right price for years, there is nothing concrete at this point.

“We do know that our club is way too busy but there is no contract or anything like that at the moment,” he said.

Pricesmart, with its headquarters in San Diego, California, currently has its operation spread across the Caribbean region as well as a membership club in El Salvador. The corporation employs more than 8000 individuals globally.

While Pricesmart Jamaica imports most of its products from the United States, Grijalva noted that the club now stocks roughly US$30 million in Jamaica products per year and hopes to increase that number.

“If we can find quality products that meets the standards we want at a good price, yes, absolutely, we would prefer to buy it here. It would be better for us since our job is to get the lowest price possible to pass on to the consumer,” he said.

In fact, Grijalva listed Jamaica as having one of the highest percentages of imported products for the membership club, since the country does not produce enough of its own goods. He is now open have to discussions with the Minister of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, Karl Samuda, on how the club can partner with local suppliers of products with a short shelf life including meats and fresh produce.

On Thursday, Jamaica’s National Competitiveness Council named trading across borders as Jamaica’s most troubled category, with a ranking of 131 of 190 countries in the globally recognised Doing Business Report. The report noted that the country took an average 105 hours to export, while import time was 152 hours and costs US$996.

That’s six hours more than import time throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and 139 more hours than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries.

It also results in an average cost of US$191 more than LAC and US$855 more than the OECD.

“It impacts the consumer because that delay in import time is translated to increased cost. If a delay is too great on fresh goods, for example, we may have to throw away some of it because it’s taking so long and the shelf life is too short, and unfortunately it has to be added to the cost of the product,” Grijalva reasoned.

He told the Sunday Finance that more efficient measures of processing imported goods, in addition to reductions in bureaucracy, would translate to lower costs, increased sale volumes and ultimately more taxes paid over to the Government from its operation.

Today, Pricesmart Jamaica has roughly 100,000 club members and renewal rate of 90 per cent. Up to last year, the company said it paid an estimated $32 million in taxes to the Government led by increasing sales volumes.