GEISHA KOW­LESSAR ALON­ZO

De­spite a slug­gish start to the back-to-school shop­ping sea­son, book­store own­ers re­main op­ti­mistic that sales will gain mo­men­tum by the end of Au­gust.

Book­sellers told the Busi­ness Guardian that many par­ents ap­pear to be hold­ing off on pur­chas­es, ei­ther com­par­ing prices or wait­ing for their Au­gust pay day.

The back-to-school mar­ket spans a wide range of es­sen­tials—from text­books and sta­tionery to uni­forms, footwear and even dig­i­tal tools like tablets and flash dri­ves.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Mo­hammed’s Book­store told the Busi­ness Guardian that par­ents are pri­ori­tis­ing the pur­chase of es­sen­tial text­books, opt­ing to de­fer buy­ing the re­main­ing items on the book­list un­til a lat­er date.

“If there are ten books on the list, four will be bought and those four will be the most im­por­tant books,” he said adding that oth­er par­ent or guardians are hold­ing off due to fi­nan­cial con­straints.

“Some peo­ple lost their jobs, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to buy back-to-school items. Oth­ers have gone away tak­ing ad­van­tage of the ex­tend­ed va­ca­tion while oth­ers pre­fer to shop for sec­ond hand books,” he said.

Vivek Char­ran, chair­man of Char­ran’s Book­stores, re­mains hope­ful that a surge in sales would oc­cur to­ward the end of this month, as par­ents com­plete their back-to-school pur­chas­es.

“The school sales for the pe­ri­od have been up and down. It was slow to start in Ju­ly, and then we saw a very, very grad­ual build-up in­to Au­gust. At this rate, it looks like it’s go­ing to be a rush com­ing down to the end,” he said.

Char­ran, an ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber on the board of the Book­sellers As­so­ci­a­tion, dis­missed claims that ris­ing book prices are mak­ing them dif­fi­cult to af­ford.

“When the Gov­ern­ment changed pow­er, we the book­sellers com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion and in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion we said that we un­der­stand where the coun­try is now and we want­ed to make a promise that as far as book­sellers are con­cerned we would not raise the prices of books. We al­so ex­plained to the min­is­ter that the price of books is not re­al­ly set by the book­sellers. The price of books is set by the pub­lish­ers. The pub­lish­ers have not com­mu­ni­cat­ed any price in­creas­es to the book­sellers and we have not seen any price in­crease. There­fore the idea that book prices are in­creas­ing is in­ac­cu­rate....One of the rea­sons we have re­sist­ed in­fla­tion­ary pres­sures suc­cess­ful­ly is ba­si­cal­ly that a lot of the pri­ma­ry school books are lo­cal­ly pub­lished there­fore do not have to be im­port­ed,” Char­ran ex­plained.

How­ev­er, he not­ed that some books are im­port­ed from the UK and may be sub­ject to in­fla­tion­ary pres­sures, which could af­fect pric­ing.

“The is­sue with the im­port­ed books from the UK is there is some in­fla­tion­ary pres­sure. There is not much but there is some be­cause if you track the forex rates par­tic­u­lar­ly with the British pound you would see that it has in­creased in the pe­ri­od lead­ing up to this back-to-school pe­ri­od. So, at the point in which book­sellers would have pur­chased or dis­trib­u­tors would have pur­chased UK books they would have done so at a rate in which the pound had ap­pre­ci­at­ed greater than what it was be­fore. That would mean that the cost would have gone up, maybe by say two to three per cent,” Char­ran ex­plained.

He not­ed lit­er­a­ture books are nor­mal­ly im­port­ed from the UK.

Re­gard­ing sta­tionery costs, Char­ran said that de­spite on­go­ing chal­lenges with for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty, prices have re­mained un­af­fect­ed.

“Prices of ba­sic sta­tionery with re­gard to pens, pen­cils, copy books and so on have re­mained pret­ty much sta­ble for the pe­ri­od,” he said.

The life­line of used Books

For sin­gle par­ent Mar­sha, a moth­er of two from Diego Mar­tin, the ar­rival of the back-to-school book­list sig­nals a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act be­tween ful­fill­ing her chil­dren’s ed­u­ca­tion­al needs and man­ag­ing a tight house­hold bud­get.

With an av­er­age back-to-school spend of $2,600 to $3,000 per child—both of whom at­tend sec­ondary school—Mar­sha said that she’s of­ten forced to nav­i­gate book­stores, road­side stalls, and even What­sApp groups in a metic­u­lous ef­fort to stretch every dol­lar.

By sourc­ing sec­ond-hand text­books, she es­ti­mates her sav­ings could reach up to 50 per cent com­pared to pur­chas­ing brand-new books.

At Unique Book­stores, which spe­cialis­es in sec­ond-hand books, sales have re­mained steady, though a last-minute rush is still an­tic­i­pat­ed, ac­cord­ing to David Ram­cha­ran, man­ag­er of the Port-of-Spain branch.

“Peo­ple have been pur­chas­ing books for core sub­jects like Maths and Eng­lish. The ex­ten­sion of the school hol­i­day may have con­tributed to slow­er sales, so we’re ex­pect­ing a surge to­ward the end of the month,” he said.

Char­ran al­so ac­knowl­edged that more par­ents are turn­ing to sec­ond-hand book­sellers in search of bet­ter deals and re­duced spend­ing.

That’s not the on­ly rea­son par­ents are hes­i­tant to buy new books.

“We’ve seen our sales de­clin­ing and that could be be­cause many more peo­ple have been buy­ing used books. Sec­ond­ly, there’s al­so been a lot of trade downs, mean­ing that schools them­selves are or­gan­is­ing that par­ents from the up­per forms trade their books to par­ents in the low­er forms and the same thing is hap­pen­ing with groups of par­ents who get to­geth­er and say ‘well okay my chil­dren are now mov­ing up so I’m will­ing to trade or sell or books to you if it is that you’re will­ing.’ So there’s a lot of these let’s say per­son­al trans­ac­tions that are hap­pen­ing over there as well that we’re aware of,” Char­ran stat­ed.

Cor­po­rate T&T has ramped up its sup­port for in­di­vid­u­als in need of books.

“It is quite heart­en­ing to see and this year is no dif­fer­ent as a mat­ter of fact this year has in­creased the num­ber of com­pa­nies and the amount of pri­vate in­di­vid­u­als that have ap­proached us to as­sist in giv­ing char­i­ty where they them­selves are tak­ing it up­on them­selves to buy the book of sev­er­al stu­dents or to help or­phan­ages and so on. Some com­pa­nies as well have said that we are go­ing to pur­chase vouch­ers to sub­sidise the course of many of our em­ploy­ees.

Par­ents fac­ing fi­nan­cial con­straints in sourc­ing school books have a va­ri­ety of av­enues to ex­plore be­yond tra­di­tion­al pur­chas­es. 

Ac­cord­ing to Char­ran, these al­ter­na­tives in­clude seek­ing as­sis­tance from non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions (NGOs) and re­li­gious en­ti­ties that pri­ori­tise so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, as well as pri­vate in­di­vid­u­als who may be will­ing to help those in need.

While of­fer­ing tips on pur­chas­ing sec­ond-hand books, he cau­tioned par­ents to be wary of street ven­dors who pho­to­copy text­books and as­sem­ble them, as these copies may be in­com­plete or have pages out of or­der.