Akash Sama­roo

Shop­pers at Trinci­ty Mall were so ea­ger for the re­open­ing of the re­tail sec­tor that some ar­rived even be­fore em­ploy­ees.

“As I reach this morn­ing it had a line out­side and as I walk in peo­ple come in be­hind me,” Kurt Mur­ray, man­ag­er of Phats In­ter­na­tion­al said to Guardian Me­dia.

“I feel­ing lib­er­at­ed!” a woman with two shop­ping bags shout­ed at us dur­ing the in­ter­view with Mur­ray.

“This is why I was anx­ious to re­open, I ex­cit­ed!” Mur­ray said with a wry smile look­ing in the di­rec­tion of the shop­per.

The ap­par­el store wasn’t the on­ly out­let busy at the mall. In the last three and half months since the clos­ing of the in­dus­try it seemed as if peo­ple had dam­aged elec­tron­ics that they were des­per­ate to change.

“My pores raise when I saw the line out­side our store,” Vashti Cooblal, man­ag­er of Sham’s Elec­tron­ics said, “it’s a won­der­ful feel­ing not on­ly for me but all the stores here.”

Store own­ers said they were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the con­stant stream of cus­tomers, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en how the econ­o­my has im­pact­ed the pub­lic.

“We were think­ing it would hard­ly have peo­ple but they still com­ing out so that’s good,” Fe­l­isha Ram­nar­ine own­er of Hel­lo Kids said.

But with the crowds came a con­cern from some shop­pers. Shop­per Ray Hay­ban, who was with his wife and two chil­dren, said he was quite wor­ried about what he was see­ing.

Customers at an Electronic Store in Trincity Mall, yesterday.

ABRAHAM DIAZ

“One of these sports stores, we ob­served that it over packed with peo­ple, so I told my wife do not en­ter be­cause we have kids and this is what peo­ple not study­ing, they are do­ing ex­act­ly what the Prime Min­is­ter said not to do, but I guess it goes in­to one ear and out the oth­er.”

Cooblal, at Sham’s Elec­tron­ics, said peo­ple may be get­ting car­ried away with the re­turn of mall op­er­a­tions.

“Some­times cus­tomers come in and it’s like they’re not aware that there are pro­to­cols to be fol­lowed and you have to re­mind them to san­i­tize and watch their dis­tance,” Cooblal said.

How­ev­er, at least 39 re­tail stores in the large mall didn’t have to wor­ry about over­crowd­ing and that’s be­cause they’ve shut their doors.

Many with large sheets of brown pa­per cov­er­ing what used to be their dis­plays with signs say­ing that due to the pan­dem­ic and its chal­lenges, they are no longer op­er­at­ing in the mall.

“If you see how much places shut up shop,” a man ex­claimed to whomev­er he was speak­ing to on his cell phone as he walked by a par­tic­u­lar­ly de­sert­ed area in the mall.

Guardian Me­dia asked mall of­fi­cials how many stores would have ter­mi­nat­ed their con­tracts