One may not have thought that this was a particularly propitious time for the opening of what, by Guyana standards, is a fairly significant investment in the fast-food industry, particularly at a time when the erratic performance of the coronavirus continues to create sufficient uncertainty as to induce a generous measure of caution, even uncertainty, in the business community. The reality is, however, that hard-nosed businessmen and women are often inclined to see investments from perspectives which ‘ordinary’ people don’t, so that last Saturday, Popeyes expanded its suite of fast-food locations to four, the latest one situated at Parika on the East Bank of Essequibo.
The first thing that should be said about the new Popeyes eatery is that the fact that it is expected to employ twenty-five Guyanese at a time when jobs are being lost on account of the coronavirus-related shrinkage in trading is welcome. Our own sense of the unemployment situation is that, at the level of small businesses, it continues to grow as a result of either the closure or the temporary cessation of operations of small and medium-sized businesses. Perhaps, surprisingly, we found too, that restaurant and snackette operations appear to be holding their own on account of two factors: ingenious approaches to marketing their product on the one hand, and taking advantage of the facility that inheres in the culinary sector to ‘re-engineer’ menus to suit people’s budgets.
