The on­go­ing for­eign ex­change short­age has led to the down­siz­ing of cloth­ing store chain K Squared Fash­ions.

In a no­tice post­ed to the com­pa­ny’s so­cial me­dia pages, the busi­ness an­nounced that on Jan­u­ary 31, it will be clos­ing its Abou­tique and Gulf City Mall branch­es as a re­sult of scarce for­eign ex­change.

The post on Sun­day said, how­ev­er, that its oth­er lo­ca­tions at C3 Cen­ter, The Falls at West Mall, Brent­wood Mall, Princes Town Mall, East Gates Mall and on­line plat­forms will re­main open for busi­ness.

The es­tab­lish­ment thanked the cus­tomers for their con­tin­u­ing sup­port dur­ing these chal­leng­ing times.

On the com­pa­ny’s Face­book page, fol­low­ers com­ment­ed that those K Squared Fash­ions branch­es will be missed for their cus­tomer ser­vice. Oth­ers opined that many more busi­ness­es will close their doors as the forex sit­u­a­tion is wors­en­ing by the month. The busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty es­pe­cial­ly the SME sec­tor, has been com­plain­ing bit­ter­ly about the lack of for­eign ex­change.

Last week, CIBC an­nounced it would de­crease the for­eign ex­change us­age lim­it for its deb­it card hold­ers in Trinidad and To­ba­go from Feb­ru­ary 10th, 2025.

This fol­lowed an­nounce­ments by RBC and Sco­tia­bank that for­eign ex­change lim­its for cred­it card users would be ad­just­ed down ear­li­er in 2025. Re­pub­lic Bank in­tro­duced a low­er cap of US$2,000 for all of its new cred­it card cus­tomers in De­cem­ber.

In a news re­lease on No­vem­ber 10, 2024, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert said, with re­gard to the Gov­ern­ment get­ting “more in­volved in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of for­eign ex­change,” he would be hold­ing con­sul­ta­tions over the next month with var­i­ous in­ter­est groups to de­ter­mine the best way for­ward.

“The present PNM Gov­ern­ment has con­sis­tent­ly stat­ed since 2015 that it main­tains our fixed ex­change rate to con­trol in­fla­tion, which is now al­most the low­est in the world, and it will not im­pose hard­ship on the poor and vul­ner­a­ble by giv­ing in­to the ir­ra­tional de­mands ... of provo­ca­teurs that we de­val­ue the dol­lar,” said Im­bert.