Retail trading this past week has been dominated by spending on items associated with equipping children to return to school for the first term of the new academic year. Every year, for some time now, the Stabroek Business has been monitoring the back-to-school shopping frenzy and each year, it seems, we take away a new understanding from the experience.
The traditional ones have had to do with the increasing costs associated with essential acquisitions and some of the sacrifices that working class families, particularly, have to make, to meet this particular annual demand. That says something about the importance which most parents attach to better positioning their children to secure an education.
Another one, of course, is the importance of the back-to-school trading season to the retail trade as a whole. The period usually brings a discernable increase in the overall volume of particular kinds of imports and there is usually money to be made – in various volumes, of course – by a range of service providers including high street traders, pavement vendors, seamstresses, tailors, shoemakers and a host of others. Once the schools reopen the snack vendors that ply their trade outside schools can also return to an earning pattern which is disrupted by two months of school holidays.
In the past two weeks or so we set out to learn more about the back-to-school shopping phenomenon from some of the important stakeholders including parents, high street traders and pavement vendors. What they chose to tell us was interesting.
Most of the parents with whom we spoke appeared to favour an economy in which wages and salaries keep pace with what they say are fairly significant periodic increases in the cost of essential school items. Interestingly, we found too that parents do not appear to have any great appetite for seasonal state handouts associated with meeting back-to-school costs since apart from the fact that such handouts have no real impact on the cost of acquisitions, the additional liquidity resulting from state handouts can sometimes have the effect of pushing prices up anyway.
Some parents have also conceded to this newspaper too that fashion pressures among their school-age children add significantly to the extent of their back-to-school spending with exorbitantly priced shoes, sneakers and haversacks ranking high on the list of ‘hot’ items demanded by school-age children.
However repetitive the process of back-to-school shopping has become, commercial Georgetown always appears somewhat underprepared when the season peaks. This year both the established traders and the vendors – the relationships that have developed among them notwithstanding – have complained about the impact of congestion on trading and both sides – somewhat unrealistically in our view – have advocated some officially imposed semblance of order in the main trading areas.
What this newspaper has discovered is that crowded shops and pavements affect the established traders and the street vendors differently. The former relish the idea of stores crowded with potential customers though not far away on their scales of preoccupations are the security implications arising out of the fact that crowded stores are actually a huge incentive for pickpockets and shoplifters. Stabroek Business found this past week that those stores with a tradition of trading heavily in back-to-school supplies had not only increased the numbers of their sales attendants but had actually ‘beefed up’ their security significantly to cater for the shoplifting eventuality which of course meant that increased trading amounted to higher wages bills.
Urban street vendors are a hardy breed who are unlikely ever to go away, whatever the efforts of the municipality. For as long as viable employment remains elusive, many unemployed mothers particularly are likely to take advantage of the seasonal opportunity of vending ‘hustles’ to fund the return of their own children to school. Last Wednesday alone no less than a dozen part-time female vendors on Regent Street told this newspaper that this was precisely the reason why they had come out onto the streets, some of them bringing along their own school-age children as helpers.
It is not easy to engage these part-time traders. They usually tackle their trading pursuit with a single-mindedness born of a knowledge of what is at stake. The piles of underwear, socks, face rags, ribbon, pens, pencils et al which they are offering have been acquired through loans secured sometimes under difficult circumstances. If the goods are not ‘cleared’ they still have to find ways of repaying those loans.
Some of the pavement vendors talk about their preference for a stall inside an arcade. What they may not know is that at this time of year many of the vendors with such stalls temporarily redirect their attention to what – at least for a period of time – is a decidedly more lucrative street hustle.
If the back-to-school trading phenomenon points to one of the more colourful manifestations of the Guyana trading culture, concealed in the confusion are all sorts of stories of challenge, hardship, sacrifice, dedication and – perhaps more than anything else – the heroism of parents, mostly mothers, it seems – to do their best by their children. It is a period the provides invaluable lessons that refine our understanding of our business culture and shines a light on socio-economic issues to which those in authority would do well to pay much greater attention.
