Nadaleen Singh

Not daunt­ed by the down­turn in the T&T econ­o­my, Adam Sab­ga man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, Stan­dard Dis­trib­u­tors Ltd said on Tues­day the com­pa­ny is en­joy­ing com­fort­able mar­ket share as it has wit­nessed its sec­ond year of dou­ble-dig­it growth.

With­out dis­clos­ing what was the com­pa­ny's rev­enue growth, he said of­fer­ing qual­i­ty and cus­tomer ser­vice are two fac­tors which give Stan­dards its com­pet­i­tive edge.

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the cer­e­mo­ny to of­fi­cial­ly re-launch Stan­dards' 30,000 square feet ANSA House lo­ca­tion on Queen Street in Port-of-Spain, Sab­ga said he planned to re­fur­bish the com­pa­ny's Canaan and Ari­ma branch­es with­in the next few weeks as well as the two branch­es in Bar­ba­dos. This means, he said, that nine branch­es would have been ren­o­vat­ed and the rest would be com­plet­ed by next year.

Con­sid­ered to be the largest and old­est lo­cal­ly owned fur­ni­ture and ap­pli­ance mer­chant, Sab­ga said the qual­i­ty Stan­dards' of­fers its cus­tomers is a habit which must be at the cen­tre of every sin­gle in­ter­ac­tion with the cus­tomer.

"Tak­ing this ap­proach (cus­tomer ser­vice) has al­lowed us to con­tin­ue to flour­ish dur­ing what is her­ald­ed as hard times, some of you may know it as re­ces­sion. I stand be­fore you here to­day and ask, what re­ces­sion? I can make this bold state­ment be­cause we are now in our con­sec­u­tive year of dou­ble dig­it growth."

De­scrib­ing the re­fur­bish­ment of the store as a "mon­u­men­tal task" Sab­ga said the store had to be closed for three weeks so it could have been re­designed and re­fur­bished to give cus­tomers an in­ter­na­tion­al shop­ping ex­pe­ri­ence.

Now us­ing what he called, "the big of­fice" he is the third gen­er­a­tion to car­ry on the fam­i­ly's busi­ness.

Even though the store is lo­cat­ed at the cor­ner of Hen­ry and Queen streets, its brand is strong­ly recog­nised by its cus­tomer base. The city of Port-of-Spain lo­ca­tion is not dieing be­cause "all one has to do is stand on the cor­ner dur­ing the day and you will see a cou­ple thou­sand peo­ple walk­ing, com­mut­ing and shop­ping through these streets and you'll ap­pre­ci­ate the city."

While he em­braced the city, he ad­mit­ted that there are chal­lenges such as "traf­fic, the lack of park­ing fa­cil­i­ties, the crime and the ven­dors who some­times ply their trade some­times on your doorstep.

"We do have com­fort in know­ing that the May­or is will­ing to part­ner with the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and do what­ev­er is need­ed to be done to re­store our cap­i­tal to the com­mer­cial (place) it once was."

Al­so speak­ing at the cer­e­mo­ny was Port-of-Spain May­or Keron Valen­tine who said the city cor­po­ra­tion does not want the city to die. Valen­tive gave a com­mit­ment that in the next fis­cal year the Gov­ern­ment would be "ag­gres­sive­ly ap­proach­ing" the de­vel­op­men­tal process in the city.

"The Port-of-Spain Cor­po­ra­tion, we will do all we can to have a user friend­ly city, a clean city, a city that we do not have to wor­ry too much about crime."