On Monday, in the middle of the afternoon, the vendors trading in the Water Street Arcade were mostly sitting around outside their stalls, talking with one another, all the while, alert to the possibility of an isolated ‘sale.’ Exactly one month before Christmas there were few shoppers in the Arcade.
After more than five years of plying their trade in the rehabilitated facility they have grown accustomed to the seasonal lull in consumer spending that usually precedes the Christmas splurge. So they stock and they wait, all the while counting the days to what some of them say is usually a two-week period of seasonal madness.
