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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Dallas Morning News
Byline: Ricardo Sandoval
Mar. 31--MEXICO CITY -- In Mexico's store wars, Wal-Mart is the evil empire, muscling into this country with an unparalleled capacity to demand the best deals from suppliers around the globe.
Mexican supermarket chains appear as the rag-tag rebels, striking back with a bold bid to cut costs by joining their wholesale buying forces and then compete with Wal-Mart at the check stand.
It's a good story line for a movie.
In real life, three well-off Mexican retailers are fighting for survival against America's largest company. An increasingly global retail industry is the backdrop. And Mexican consumers are in the audience, cheering as the battle leads to lower retail food prices.
So far, Wal-Mart has the lead. Gigante, Comercial Mexicana, and Soriana were dealt a blow earlier this month when the government's competition commission rejected their idea to fuse their purchasing units into a venture called Sinergia.
The chains want to build scale and lower their purchasing and distribution costs -- savings that they say could then be passed on to consumers. But three of the five competition regulators ruled on the side of food and merchandise wholesalers who argued that the fusion would leave Mexico with just...
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