KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Pres­i­dent of the Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion (SATT) Bion­di Bachew is as­sur­ing the pop­u­la­tion that there is no need for pan­ic buy­ing or rushed shop­ping.

The as­sur­ance came af­ter the Gov­ern­ment and the Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent put to rest re­ports that the US would ini­ti­ate strikes on land tar­gets in Venezuela “in a mat­ter of days,” linked to drug traf­fick­ing.

There were crowds at sev­er­al ma­jor su­per­mar­kets in South Trinidad yes­ter­day, caus­ing traf­fic con­ges­tion in some ar­eas. While this is typ­i­cal for month-end, some shop­pers ad­mit­ted that re­ports of pos­si­ble con­flict in the re­gion prompt­ed them to pur­chase ex­tra food and house­hold sup­plies in case they need­ed to re­main in­doors for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Bachew con­firmed there had been an un­usu­al uptick in shop­ping ac­tiv­i­ty at su­per­mar­kets, ex­ceed­ing the nor­mal month-end rush. He said the surge may have been in­flu­enced by re­ports that sur­faced ear­li­er in the day, sug­gest­ing the US would con­duct strikes in Venezuela. This was soon fol­lowed by news that mem­bers of the De­fence Force had been or­dered to re­port to var­i­ous mil­i­tary in­stal­la­tions fol­low­ing a di­rec­tive is­sued in the morn­ing.

How­ev­er, SATT is as­sur­ing the pub­lic that there is no need for pan­ic buy­ing or rushed shop­ping in re­sponse to those re­ports, not­ing that they have since been de­bunked. Bachew said the as­so­ci­a­tion’s con­fi­dence comes from its un­der­stand­ing of lo­cal sup­ply chain lo­gis­tics and the strong stock lev­els with­in mem­ber su­per­mar­kets. He said stores re­main well sup­plied with es­sen­tial and gen­er­al items, and there is no threat to avail­abil­i­ty.

Bachew added that su­per­mar­kets con­tin­ue to op­er­ate as nor­mal and urged shop­pers to re­main calm, em­pha­sis­ing that there is a ro­bust in­ven­to­ry of goods and sta­ble re­la­tion­ships with sup­pli­ers to en­sure shelves re­main re­plen­ished.

“There is no need to rush to get those items in a bulk sort of fash­ion, as well as there has been re­cent re­port­ing that we have seen com­ing out of the Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs, sort of de­bunk­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia re­port­ing. That, I be­lieve, was the Mi­a­mi Her­ald, which was al­so re­fut­ed by a Reuters re­port,” Bachew said.