Retail traders hoping to make up for tough year
The commercial capital erupted into a frenzy of activity last week-end as urban dwellers provided the first real indication that they were genuinely stricken with the Christmas spirit.
The sudden burst of activity came perhaps a week or two later than it customarily does at this time of year and just a week after the Stabroek Business had drawn attention to the unusual pre-Christmas quiet in the capital.
This newspaper was neither able to unable all of the businessmen whom it spoke with two weeks ago nor is able at this stage to say definitively whether the packed stores in the capital are indicative of a corresponding level of trading. However, those Regent street stores that we visited this week appeared suitably seized with the Christmas spirit, their crowded interiors presenting a striking contrast to what obtained just a week earlier when proprietors were wondering aloud as to just when Christmas would come for them.
The weeks immediately preceding Christmas can account for as much as 80 per cent of turnover in downtown stores and concerns that shoppers have gotten off to a late start have been accentuated by the fact that 2009 has been, up until now, a difficult year for the retail trade.
Indications from the heads of both the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) are that Christmas shopping this year could be marked by uncharacteristically conservative behaviour though the GCCI head told Stabroek Business that it will be difficult for many people to suppress the urge to “splash out” for Christmas. The Chairman of the PSC is hoping that any increase in year-end consumer spending benefit the local manufacturing which he says is “badly in need of a boost following what has been a tough year.”
With wage-earners, notably public servants being among the largest categories of consumers, news that government has approved a 6 per cent pay hike retroactive to January this year may have been good news as much for the retail sector as for the public servants themselves. Still, most of the forty or so public servants with whom this newspaper spoke scoffed at the idea that their meagre ‘top up’ would make a difference to the quality of their respective Christmases.
Public servants have long become accustomed to peppercorn rates and meagre increases and despite their chant that six per cent ain’t enough most of them told this newspaper that they were determined that the tight-fistedness of the government would not spoil their Christmas.
Though the seasonal picture is far from rosy for urban consumers, bauxite workers in Linden, Aroaima and Kwakwani could be facing even tougher times. At Linden, the Chinese company Bosai has had to cut both production targets and staff more than once this year while the majority Russian-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc. is locked in an industrial dispute with the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers Union (GB&GWU) which the union president says could place the company in a perilous position if the Russian top management does not change what he described as “their high-handed ways.”
Sugar too, having endured a year-long battering resulting from both the domestic and international vicissitudes of a volatile industry seem set to end the year in a condition of uncertainty arising out of the dissatisfaction of workers with a 3 per cent pay increase.
Still, the belated signs of an increase in retail trading that has become commonplace at Christmas appears to point to a determination on the part of Guyanese to make the best of the season, whatever the start of the new year threatens to throw at them.
