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 Business News | April 2008 
Sales of Secondhand Goods in Murrieta Fuel a Growing Underground Economy in Mexico
 Chris Richard - The Press-Enterprise
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| | Crowds gather on a Saturday morning to check out items at a garage sale in Murrieta. The Inland area’s fame as a weekend bargain center has spread south into Mexico. Scholars say it may play a role in international trade. (Ed Crisostomo/The Press-Enterprise) | 
| | Alfonso Gutierrez, of Tijuana, heads to his next stop on a weekend of garage sale shopping. He sells the items for a profit. (Ed Crisostomo/The Press-Enterprise) | | |
Early on a spring Saturday, the streets of Murrieta's stucco subdivisions bloom with flashes of color, signs pointing the way to garage sales.
The fluorescent orange and hot-pink pointers lead to 17 - family sales, mega sales, moving sales, soccer team booster club sales, spring cleaning sales - array after neat array of children's outgrown bicycles, secondhand washing machines, books and videos, shoes and T-shirts and home fitness equipment.
In the no-nonsense bustle, one group of shoppers stands out. Most drive pickup trucks, usually new and shiny, with Baja California license plates. They arrive just after dawn, sometimes knocking on garage doors to start the haggling early, vendors say.
Murrieta's fame as a weekend bargain center has spread south into Mexico, and, scholars think, may play a role in an international trade that extends around the globe.
Mexicans cross the border Friday night, hit the Murrieta sales early Saturday, then return home with trucks laden with cut-rate goods for resale, from Barbie dolls to bedroom furniture to washing machines.
"When I get home, I can sell anything I buy here for double what I paid or more," said Alfonzo Gutierrez, who travels from Tijuana to Murrieta on buying trips every weekend.
During a recent interview, the bed of Gutierrez's pickup held a washing machine he paid $10 for and a bicycle that cost him $5. That's a lot less, he said, than he'd expect to pay at sales closer to the border, where keen demand from Mexican shoppers has been pushing prices up. After the Murrieta stop, he planned to collect some used furniture in Perris.
"It's a lot of driving," he said. "But if you do it right, it's a living."
Cuauhtémoc Calderón, an economist at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, said there has long been a cross-border trade in secondhand clothing, with much of the used apparel sold at open-air markets in Mexico City.
He said since 2000, stagnation in the Mexican economy has brought an "exponential" growth and diversification in such trade, with markets for varied products springing up across Mexico.
The trend is continuing despite signs that Mexico's economy is improving. The country's gross domestic product grew by 4.8 percent in 2007, the fastest in six years. The official unemployment rate is less than 4 percent.
Underemployment
But scholars say such statistics skim over chronic under-employment and widespread economic hardship. By the Mexican government's count, some 45 percent of the population lives in moderate or extreme poverty. Other federal data suggests joblessness may be considerably higher among the young.
In a 2006 national survey - the most recent federal data available - three out of 10 people between the ages of 20 and 29 reported that they were unemployed.
Researchers say that in increasing numbers, Mexicans who can't find conventional employment are slipping into a parallel network of under-the-table jobs, Mexico's "informal economy." A study by an economist at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City pegs the size of that informal economy at almost 16 percent of the country's population.
Calderón said that growth undermines traditional businesses that pay rent and taxes.
Lori Haley, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the commerce does not appear to violate U.S. law, and the agency does not track it closely. But Mexican law does seek to stem the tide, said Mireya Magaña, spokeswoman for the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles.
Limits Ignored
During the Christmas holidays, Mexican citizens returning from the United States may bring gifts worth up to $300, Magaña said. The rest of the year, the limit is $50, she said.
Researchers say people regularly flout that rule.
"There is a difference between policy and policy implementation," said University of Texas political science professor Kathleen Staudt, who has studied cross-border trade under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
As far back as the early 1990s, clothing traders regularly evaded Mexican import restrictions at the Texas border by representing themselves as ordinary shoppers, Staudt wrote in an e-mail.
No formal statistics are available on the number of foreign buyers in Murrieta each weekend. But local vendors think the number is growing.
"You see them heading home at the end of the day," said Kent Aiken, who held a moving sale recently. "They'll have stuff stacked in their trucks as tight as they can get it"
John Schroeder, author of the 2005 book "Garage Sale Fever," says there's a good chance the trade will grow. In the second-hand market, information about good shopping locations spreads quickly by word of mouth, Schroeder said.
Underground Economies
Niko Besnier, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said exceptions to import duties like Mexico's gift exemption serve other underground economies as well.
As a researcher at UCLA, Besnier documented how Southern California immigrants from the South Pacific archipelago of Tonga support relatives back home with regular shipments of gifts.
Those items replace or supplement cash remittances in the islands, where local traders sell them for prices conventional traders can't match, Besnier said. A similar pattern in the Philippines has led authorities to restrict shipments of used clothing, he said.
People who hold garage sales in Murrieta say in addition to Mexican nationals, Filipinos are among their best customers.
Dodz Solomon, a native of the Philippine province of Cebu, said he's been shopping the sales for relatives for two decades. He sends a 2-foot-by-2-foot box of gifts home every three months, he said.
Solomon said it's not a business to him. His relatives need the clothing.
"A T-shirt that would sell for $15 or $20, I can get here for $1," he said. "Even with the shipping, it works out."
Reach Chris Richard at crichard(at)PE.com
What the law says
Mexican traders who buy secondhand goods in the U.S. for resale at home are operating legally here, but may be flouting Mexican import restrictions.
$300: Limit on gifts a Mexican citizen may bring across the international border during the Christmas holidays
$50: Amount of goods exempt from Mexican import duties at any other time
Source: Mexican consulate, Los Angeles |
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