Abstract
The present paper explores the ongoing financial logic diffusion over the Brazilian retail sector, aiming to better understand the approximation between the national retail companies and the financial institutions which have boosted the consumption credit from the 2000s in Brazil. To this end, it concentrates on (1) the new organizational formats that will result from the partnerships between the retail stores and the financial institutions; (2) the moves of mergers and acquisitions (M & A) involving these firms; (3) the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) of retail stores; (4) the participation of national and international investment funds within the retail companies; and (5) the retail stores' financial product gross margin vis a vis to the gross margin performance of their traditional products. Such approximation between the retail companies and the financial institutions is herein presented according to the Bourdiesian notion of field, viewing the construction of the national financial retail field, which has highlighted how tenuous the limits between the retail stores’ endings and the financial institutions’ beginnings have become.
Keywords:
Retail; Financialization; Mergers; Acquisitions; Private label cards; Organizational formats