One of the key functions of the Guyana Shop, as we understand it, is to serve as a display and marketing facility to raise awareness of the availability of some local products, mostly foods, beverages, spices and condiments as they become available. It does so by affording these products shelf space and promotional ‘push’.
It has been doing a reasonable job in that regard. Local consumers apart, its role as a ‘must visit’ location for holidaying Guyanese seeking to return to their homes abroad with ‘bits and pieces’ of Guyana in their suitcases is noteworthy. Foreigners visiting Guyana, too, have found their way to the Guyana Shop’s Robb and Alexander streets location, having earlier been ‘briefed’ on the reputations of particular local products and eager to get their hands on samples of those.
Since locally produced food items and other products must satisfy product quality criteria before they can ‘make’ the shelves of the more popular supermarkets and win consumer confidence, The Guyana Shop also offers a kind of testing ground, patterned after the concept of ‘creeping before walking’. Here, the facility offers, through its parent body, the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), advice on the various facets of product enhancement.
The Guyana Shop also plays a role in the planning and execution of the GMC’s Farmers’ Market, occasions that open another promotion and sales windows for local products.
This newspaper has, over the past few years, been reporting regularly on aspects of the work of the GMC including the services provided by The Guyana Shop. We say again that its contribution to the public promotion of locally produced goods has been noteworthy. Times change, however, and if The Shop is to retain its relevance as a local product-promotion entity it will now have to raise its game.
With both local and external interest in ‘what Guyana has to offer’ almost certain to grow in the period ahead, the need for allocating more resources to the creation of a facility that conforms to the standards associated with the contemporary display/shopping facility, is the Guyana Shop’s most urgent need. The setting in which local products are marketed must conform to the higher consumer acceptance standards that obtain today if they are to be well-received. Those standards have, to a greater or lesser extent, been met by some privately owned local supermarkets. We believe that if (as it should be) The Guyana Shop wants to be regarded as the flagship outlet for the promotion of locally produced foods, beverages, condiments, spices et al, then it must be capable of offering that which it seeks to promote in a convivial environment. There can be no compromising of that requirement.
Going forward, the Guyana Shop, as presently appointed, is well situated to play the flagship role effectively.
Setting the modernisation of the facility aside (and there are templates after which a ‘new look’ Guyana Shop can be patterned) a Guyana Shop should be provided with its own unique creative flair. There is need, as well, for The Guyana Shop to pay specialised attention to efficient management of the grocery retail supply chains, optimizing a broad inventory that includes fresh and short-shelf-life products in order to ensure the enduring wholesomeness of what it offers. All of this, of course, requires training for functionaries in areas that include supply chain and supermarket inventory management. The ‘bottom line’ here is that the requirement of effective local and international marketing for locally manufactured products cries out for an expanded role for The Guyana Shop.
Contextually, given the little we know about the administrative confines within which The Guyana Shop operates, there may well be, at this juncture, a strong case for removing the Shop (and perhaps even the GMC itself) from what in some circumstances, may well be the administrative and operational strictures within which it is required to function as an arm of the Ministry of Agriculture. That would hardly be a precedent insofar as separating state institutions from the traditional public service confines in circumstances where it is felt that such separation might enhance their effectiveness.
Editor’s note:
This column was published following comments made regarding The Guyana Shop and its role as a window to the world of local products by visitors to the facility.
