Read Online Gilded Lily by Isabel Vincent - Free Book Online

great pleasure—the pleasure of creation and because I love Globex as I would love my son,” he wrote in a letter to his sister a few years after he founded Globex.
    â€œDo not think if I work twelve hours a day it is to make more money,” he continued in the letter. “I do this because I get so much satisfaction out of my work.”
    Alfredo had no qualms about rolling up his shirtsleeves and changing places with one of his sales staff on the Ponto Frio sales floor at the Rua Uruguaiana store. This way he could anticipate any problems experienced on the sales floor and deal directly with his customers. “Let’s change for the day,” he was fond of telling his bemused staff.“You pretend you’re me in the corporate offices, and I’ll pretend to be you and deal with customers.”
    Most of his friends and business associates described Alfredo as a visionary. “He was talking about computers when no one talked about computers,” said Sztern, who looked upon Alfredo as a substitute father after his own parents died while he was still in his teens. “He wanted to do things like recycle paper, and he wanted to create a popular bank for the poor because he sensed that Brazil was missing a popular instrument of credit.”
    While many of Alfredo’s early clients were prosperous consumers like himself, it was among the ranks of the impoverished masses that his company was to have its greatest success. Alfredo made huge sums of money creating a system of credit for Brazil’s working classes, who could not afford to buy appliances or other big-money items outright. The scheme led to a consumer revolution across the country in the days before credit cards were commonplace. It was a risk, to be sure. How could he be sure that the country’s poor would ever pay off a refrigerator, which for many was as monumental as the purchase of a house or a car? It was a risk he was willing to take, for he fervently believed that the poor, so grateful to obtain credit on favorable terms, would rarely default on a payment. The poor, he was fond of saying, are better at managing credit than most people with money. Credit at Ponto Frio was easier to arrange than at banks, which charged enormous interest rates. When buyers fell behind on a payment at Ponto Frio, Alfredo simply lowered their monthly payments to an amount they could afford.
    â€œSometimes we had people who would come into the office and say they couldn’t pay the monthly installment,” said Maria Consuelo Ayres, Alfredo’s first and most trusted employee, who began working for him in 1946. “He would lower the rate, and before you knew it the buyer would bring in a friend who also wanted to buy something on credit.”
    The installment system Alfredo pioneered in the 1950s is now commonplace in a country where the minimum wage hovers at just under $200 per month. In Brazil, prices are displayed in shop windows in multiples of the actual price, and the consumer can buy everything from clothing to appliances and cars in installments, the payment terms of which can range from five months to two years.
    Laurinda Soares Navarro, Alfredo’s housekeeper, was an early beneficiary of this new system of credit. Laurinda lived with her two young sons in the Parque da Cidade favela—a jumble of half-finished brick and stucco houses connected by a warren of steep stairs and concrete alleyways in the hills above Rio where hundreds of slaves had worked the coffee plantations of the Marquis de São Vicente in the nineteenth century. Like most of her impoverished neighbors—all of them squatters who had built ramshackle houses on the marquis’s former estate—Laurinda had no refrigerator. Alfredo arranged for Ponto Frio to deliver a gleaming new Coldspot refrigerator to her home, and discounted the monthly payments from her salary until it was completely paid off.
    Alfredo’s success in