With the beginning of the new school year now just over a week away, the Stabroek Business this week took its customary ‘test’ of the commercial temperature in downtown Georgetown as parents continue to ‘cough up’ the millions of dollars that it will take to get their children back into the classroom.
Parents who customarily finance the purchasing of supplies for the new school year from specially set aside savings or make their purchases over several months beginning perhaps at the end of June, will find that once again this year they would have come out ahead of their counterparts who have opted to place the entire burden on their August earnings. By the middle of this week we found that downtown stores and pavement vendors alike had shifted their attention more seriously to offering school supplies. Our own assessment is that those parents who have opted to wait to make all of their purchases between this weekend and the next will have to pay more – perhaps as much as between five and eight per cent more in some cases.
Our estimate, based on a modest survey done over the past eight to ten days, suggests that those numbers might be considerable. Up to
