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Business View Magazine
the US. It has 1.5 million membership accounts repre-
senting a total of about three million members.
Naylon says that the company doesn’t do a great deal
of marketing, relying mostly upon Sol Price’s maxim
that the “unsolicited testimonial” is the best way to
run a business. “People tell each other about the great
deal that they found, the great prices. It spreads word-
of-mouth,” he declares. “We have a very limited mar-
keting budget. We spend money when we open a new
club to do some initial marketing. Other than that, we
have a small team of people in each club that go out
and work with large employers. We go to a business
that has, say, 500 employees, and try to get employ-
ers to buy memberships for their employees. We also
have a few people in each club who focus on our small
business members, helping them grow their business
through the items they can purchase from us.”
Naylon concedes that the membership warehouse
model is not necessarily the best choice for every
shopper in every situation. “If you want to come in to a
warehouse club in the United States or a PriceSmart in
the markets we operate in, and you want to buy chick-
en, you’re going to buy four or five pounds of chicken;
if you want to buy beer, it’s going to be a case; if you
want to buy toilet paper, it’s going to be 32 rolls. As far
as buying 12 tomatoes - if you only have two people at
home, that doesn’t necessarily make sense.”
Nonetheless, he also insists that almost everyone can
save some money with a club membership, especially
when buying individual items. For example, PriceSmart
carries a good selection of fine wines and a shopper
