There is an intensity in the engagement between buyers and sellers in the city during the final days leading to the start of the new school year. It may not match the frenzied excitement of Christmas shopping; it is, however, in its own right, an important episode on the local commercial calendar.
This week, the downtown traders, both the pavement vendors and the established merchants, are taking nothing for granted. From the beginning of this year a new army of traders appears to have materialized. On Regent Street, particularly, merchants appear to occupy every nook and cranny. The advent of a host of Chinese retail stores has added to the commercial crush. As the start of the school year draws closer the competition between seasonal pavement vendors and established businesses appears to grow keener.
A cluster of vendors at the corner of Regent and Wellington streets told us that the middle of the penultimate week in August was not the optimum time to catch the huge back-to-school wave. “People aint get pay yet,” one of them volunteered.” This particular cluster of vendors was offering underwear, socks and ribbons. One of them thought it wise to diversify into pencils and erasers.
A few potential shoppers wandered by and the cluster of vendors abandoned their exchanges with us and raised their voices to market their goods. They are under no illusions that they are enjoying a window of commercial opportunity which is likely to be followed by a protracted drought that will probably persist until the start of the Christmas season.
The sparseness of shoppers was evident. On the north western side of the corner of Regent and Wellington streets a vendor was contemplating scores of pairs of shoes packed haphazardly on a huge stand. His is one of the more popular shoe ‘stores’ on Regent Street. There was not a buyer in sight and he said that he was prepared to wait for the weekend. We talked with him for a while, idly examining the shoes on offer and asking prices. It seemed to us that over the past year school shoes might have crept their way up from a lower end of twenty five hundred dollars to three thousand dollars. The ceiling has clearly shot up too. He was asking up to five thousand dollars for a pair of school shoes. Simultaneously, he was talking up the quality of what he said were new imports.
School shoes have become a ‘headache’ for parents. The cheaper ones are sold pasted and not stitched. Those are unreliable and in order to ensure that they last beyond a few weeks you need to invest a further thousand dollars having them stitched by a shoemaker. Still, with ordinary parents constantly on the lookout for what they often mistakenly perceive as ‘bargains’ there were plenty of the low-end school shoes around this week.
Whilst we were talking with the shoe seller a nearby vendor was pressing three pairs of socks into the hands of an uncertain-looking mother. The asking price was five hundred dollars. She pondered the offer and turned it down. We had pounded the pavements too and three pairs for five hundred dollars appeared to be the asking price.
Walking on the pavement on Regent Street was an ordeal. People may not have been spending but they were walking and looking and stopping and ‘pricing’ and the process amounted to an uncomfortable congestion.
At the corner of Camp and Regent streets, contiguous to the Republic Bank car park, the congestion had become a bottleneck. A collection of about four vendors were operating in a terribly cramped space. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to mind the limited room. It occurred to us that there was an odd sort of logic to that cramped space. You could only make your way through gingerly and that bought the vendors some time to make their sales pitches.
On this particular corner the vendors were offering small items, shoe laces, shoe polish, socks, ribbons and underwear. One of the vendors was offering watches at prices that appeared to start at around eight hundred dollars.
It occurred to us that there was no City Police Patrol in sight. It appears that the seasonal window of opportunity had been agreed upon by the vendors and the municipality.
We wandered into a few downtown stores. Some parents appeared to be interested in a ‘10 per cent off’ offer on school supplies – mostly stationery at Guyana Stores. Quite a few more, however, had congregated in an area of the store where huge piles of uniform-related pieces – shirts, trousers and dresses were stacked. Ready-made school uniforms are popular with parents these days. The established merchants offer most if not all of the various school colours and a scheme of sizes which appear to have been arbitrarily determined but which seem to work anyway.
From Guyana Stores, we headed south, along the Water Street pavement. Again, there was much evidence of school supplies but rather less evidence of shoppers. Haversacks – which have grown appreciably in popularity among children over the years – were being hauled out of huge cartons to be hung on doors and walls. A few vendors appeared to be making wholesale purchases from the established merchant offering the haversacks.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, two men appeared, dramatically emptying dozens of pairs of black rubber-soled shoes on the pavement. The asking price was fifteen hundred dollars per pair and the ‘offer’ secured some momentary attention among shoppers. One of the vendors was twisting and bending the shoe into various shapes to make a point about its durability. Not too many people appeared interested and eventually the two men dragged the shoes to a corner so that pedestrians could go by.
The strip of parallel aisles that form an arcade going east towards Regent Street from Water Street is a deceptively busy trading area. The vendors in the Arcade were curious about our mission though once they learnt that we were doing an assignment for the newspapers they perked up. We took some pictures and they told us the familiar story about the day being a slow one. A shoe vendor was pensive about an investment that she had made in several pairs of ‘brand name’ sneakers. She told us that ‘this time last year’ her “regulars” had already shown up.
Back on Regent Street we ventured into a number of small shops, limited spaces crammed with goods of all sorts. These are, in many cases, cramped, claustrophobic enclosures and you are not inclined to remain inside for any length of time. Some of the proprietors are brooding. Business, they say, is slow. They are not in a mood to talk. You have to coax them and when you do you discover that some of them are fretful about the increasing numbers of vendors that ‘choke off’ much of their patronage. They appear resigned to the situation.
More shops are offering stationery these days. Some of those on Regent Street are offering a full range. Stationery is perhaps the item in which price and quality vary most. A group of shoppers, one of the largest we had encountered on Regent Street, were paying interest in stacks of sturdy-looking, hard-covered exercise books. Older children, who appeared to be preparing to sit the CXC examination, were in tow.
A few Regent Street shops east of Camp Street were attracting the interest of shoppers. One of them, particularly, appeared to be doing a brisk wholesale trade in socks, underwear, face rags and lunch kits. Shoppers were emerging from crowded areas with black plastic bags stuffed with assorted school items. A woman with a child observed our curiosity and afforded us a briefing on the shop’s wholesale bargains. She said that she could get a number school items there at a better price and that the wholesale facility afforded her the opportunity to “buy for the whole year.” She volunteered that apart from the nine year-old in tow she was the mother of another two children aged eleven and thirteen. She appeared pleased with her bargains.
By mid-week both the vendors and the established merchants appeared to be preparing for the final wave of shoppers. The group of vendors that we had first engaged at the corner of Regent and Wellington streets told us monthly-paid workers were due to be paid today, Friday. We did not bother to ask them how they had come by that information.
