John’s Cake Decoration & Bakery Service is a modest home-based enterprise, a typical local micro-business, run from 347 Recht-door-Zee, La Parfaite Harmonie. It is owned and operated by a 38-year-old mother of two, Andrea Douglas-John, a bustling young woman whose talents for cooking and baking have won her a still modest, but growing reputation in the neighbourhood where she lives.
John’s Cake Decoration & Bakery Service turns out an impressive range of ‘sweet mouths’… cakes, pastries, ice creams and custards, as well as ‘bellyfulls’ like roti, curry, bake and salt fish, egg balls, black, and white puddings and souse… there are pickles too… golden apple, and mango-flavoured ones. All of these can be ‘washed down’ with the range of fruit-based juices that she offers.
Micro and small businesses like Andrea’s have come to form the financial foundation that sustains the lives of working class families across the country. Sustaining what, in effect are risky enterprises, amount for the most part, to back-breaking assignments that frequently bring only marginal returns.
