Argentine Walmart Stores Have Morphed Into ChangoMas! But What's Changed?

In late 2020, I mentioned on my blog that Walmart had sold their stores to a Latin American retail company called Grupo de Narvaez. I initially assumed that the Walmart I knew and loved was going to vanish from the face of Argentina forever.

It did not.

The supermarket chain morphed into ChangoMas. Relax! It’s not as exciting as it sounds. For starters, there were ChangoMas in Argentina long before Walmart was sold in 2020. The only thing ChangoMas did was incorporate all of the former Walmart stores into their business chain.

I couldn’t stop wondering how much had changed about the store. Unfortunately, the world was right smack in the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t check the store out until 2022.

The company retained Walmart’s signature blue color and yellow star symbol on their logo, but the name of the store had obviously changed.

I’ll admit that seeing the name changed to ChangoMas felt like a punch in the gut.

Once I recovered, I grabbed a cart and went to see if anything had changed on the inside. Surprisingly, the store’s layout had remained the same. 

ChangoMas doesn't use Walmart's "rollback prices" slogan, but they do claim to offer low prices. This is pretty ironic since the prices I saw were relatively the same as those in other Argentine markets.

As far as the products, you can forget about the international section. In retrospect, that section was gone years before the name change.

They do have one or two items you won’t generally find in Argentine supermarkets such as Philadelphia Cheese Spread and Ginger Ale.  

One thing that upset me was an exchange between an employee and a foreign customer. The customer had asked for an item that I assumed was specific to his country of origin. The employee, who was stocking shelves at the time, responded by shouting: “volvete a tu pais,” which translates to “go back to your country.” The statement was followed by expletive language and cheering by the employee’s fellow co-workers.

The customer was obviously upset, but when I approached him, he said he preferred to leave the store rather than complain. So, I took matters into my own hands and speak with the manager myself. Unfortunately, he was unavailable. But when they asked me why I wanted to see him, I explained what had happened.

The ChangoMas employee could have cared less about my complaint, and it showed.

Over the last ten years, people have shouted similar statements, so it was a bit of a trigger for me to hear these employees say what they did to that customer. It was even more infuriating knowing that no one cared.

Sadly, that’s Argentina for you.

Will I go back to ChangoMas? Maybe, but I’m definitely not going to the store where this incident happened.