When you buy a TV in 12 installments during a Cyber event, it's entirely possible the retailer makes zero pesos on that TV.
And even so, for them, that sale can be one of the best deals of the year.
Because they didn't sell you a TV. They originated a loan at a rate around 38% a year. The TV was the bait. The loan is the product.
If you understand that sentence, you understand why these events exist, why the big players can sell below margin and not feel it, and why the specialist that tries to match their prices is digging its own grave.
Every June at Yaneken we have the same discussion: do we go in or not?
The two numbers you're only shown one of
CyberDay 2026 closed at US$531 million in Chile. A record, everyone said. Up 1.4% in dollars.
The number that made no headline: transactions fell 4% versus the year before, to 5.1 million. Fewer people bought. Sales rise because the ticket rises and inflation rises, not because more people show up. A mature market dressed up as an expanding one.
And trust is cracking. Recent surveys found only half of Chileans believe the discounts are real. At one event, an independent monitor flagged more than 142,000 products with inflated prices beforehand — in 91% of cases, the price was raised days before so it could be "discounted" later.
The most honest data point is behavior. According to BCG, which surveyed 10,000 people across 10 countries, 77% of consumers admit they delay purchases during the year to wait for events like Black Friday. The shopper learned to wait, to distrust the first price, to hold out until the final minute — because they know that if they wait, the discount comes.
We trained them. That's the first edge of the double-edged sword. The second is worse, and it's structural.
They aren't stores. They're banks with a storefront.
The names that dominate Chilean retail events — Falabella, Ripley, Cencosud, Mercado Libre — share something that never shows up in an ad: retail isn't where they make their money.
Ripley is the cleanest case. In 2024 the whole group's profit was about CLP 54 billion. Banco Ripley Chile alone contributed roughly CLP 32 billion. Nearly 60% of group profit comes from the bank, before you add the Peru bank. Retail in Chile ran a 3.8% margin. The stores are a thin shell around a credit operation. Over 90% of the bank's loan book is Tarjeta Ripley users: the loan is, literally, the store card.
Falabella: around 60% of department-store sales are paid with CMR. When analysts took apart its financials a few years back, the bank plus CMR were close to 22% of group EBITDA on under 10% of revenue — CMR at a 40% margin against 7.7% for the department stores. In the company's own words back then: retail is "the entry door"; the real business is interest and fees.
Cencosud was the shrewdest: it realized the bank was the prize and sold it. It handed 51% of its card to Scotiabank for US$280 million and kept 49% and the customer relationship. The retailer that admitted it was a bank and got paid for it.
And Mercado Libre is the modern version. Its fintech is already more than 40% of revenue and grows faster than commerce. Its credit portfolio passed US$7.8 billion, up 75% in a year. Moody's said it without anesthesia: financial services are "the primary drivers of revenue and profitability." Commerce is run thin, on purpose, to feed credit and float.
This model isn't new, and it isn't Chilean. In the US, Sears once made 60% of its profit from its credit card. It sold the card to Citibank in 2003, and went bankrupt in 2018. There the model got regulated and retreated. Here, credit is still the core — and global banks are buying in to get a piece.
Let me be clear: it's a brilliant model, and perfectly legitimate. If I had a bank behind my stores, I'd play the same way. I'm not telling you this to accuse anyone, but so you understand the game you're actually in.
The loan-origination event dressed as a clearance
Put the two pieces together.
For these players, a Cyber event isn't a product-selling event. It's a loan-origination event dressed up as a clearance.
When a store with a bank sells a product at zero margin in 12 installments, it didn't lose. It captured a customer, opened a line, and will recover the product margin — and far more — through the installment, at rates around 38% a year. The discount is what it cost them to acquire that loan. Cheap, compared to what it yields afterward.
That's why they can sell below merchandise cost without breaking a sweat: they aren't selling merchandise, they're originating debt.
I operate 160 stores and 10+ brands. I live on selling a product well, not on financing it — and that difference changes everything.
And there's the trap for the specialist: when whoever sells only product enters the event to match those prices, it lowers its only real margin, with no installment to recover it later. It matches the bait without owning the hook.
Training your customer never to pay full price
Every Cyber, every clearance, every "incredible price for 72 hours" teaches the customer what price they should pay. Economists call it the reference price. I call it training your own customer never to buy from you at full price again.
The research is consistent: between 30% and 50% of promotional sales aren't incremental. They're future sales pulled forward. The ones you'd have made anyway next month, at margin. You cannibalized them and discounted them on top.
For the big player with a bank it doesn't matter: the full-price sale it lost, it recovers through credit. For the specialist who lives on product margin, every discount retrains the customer to wait for the next one, and erodes the only source of profit it has.
I include myself. I've done it, and I'm still fighting this one internally.
So how does a specialist compete?
Not by matching the price. That fight is played on a line of the balance sheet that isn't ours, and we already lost it there.
You compete with an honest price all year. If your customer knows your price is the same in March as in June, they stop waiting for the event to come see you. It sounds obvious, but it runs against everything the industry does, which is exactly why almost no one holds the line. It's the discipline I admire in Costco: charging less margin than you could, always, until your price stops being a question.
Then there's everything a 38% installment can't buy: the advice, the right size, the after-sale that actually resolves, the feeling of walking into a place that knows what it's doing. In the age of commoditization, the one thing nobody can copy is how you make someone feel. The margin no bank can copy is in the service.
And there's brand. There are categories where the product sells itself, and there discounting doesn't drive sales: it destroys value. We've seen it in our own portfolio: in the middle of a Cyber event, Bamers' most iconic product grew 44% selling at regular price.
But in the end you win by being the best at something. A real specialist, who knows their category with a depth that the one who sells a little of everything will never have. One Cyber proved it for us: Hoka, our most specialist brand, grew 136% with margin intact and conversion that nearly doubled — without playing the discount game. There you stop competing against a bank and compete against another store. And another store, you beat.
The next event will break records again. And while everyone runs to match the price, the question that actually matters is a different one: what are you so good at that your customer doesn't need a discount to choose you?
If your promotional calendar is built around someone else's events, that's worth a conversation.
América Retail covered this analysis as "El espejismo del descuento" in June 2026.