Fam­i­ly ori­ent­ed busi­ness­es can boost the lo­cal econ­o­my of their com­mu­ni­ties. This point was made by Mukesh Ram­s­ingh, the pres­i­dent of the Cou­va Point Lisas Cham­ber of Com­merce while speak­ing at the re-open­ing of D's Pu­ja Store, Cal­i­for­nia in cen­tral Trinidad on Mon­day. 

He said, "The in­vest­ment that these busi­ness­es put in­to the com­mu­ni­ty re­sults in the com­mu­ni­ty get­ting bet­ter ser­vices and in many in­stances, em­ploy­ment is al­so gen­er­at­ed. I be­lieve that fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed busi­ness­es work very hard to main­tain sus­tain­abil­i­ty and try to keep costs down as much as pos­si­ble. Busi­ness­es with­in a com­mu­ni­ty space go a long way in re­duc­ing is­sues such as traf­fic con­ges­tion and time man­age­ment since the con­sumer does not have to leave his com­mu­ni­ty and ven­ture to ur­ban ar­eas for goods and ser­vices. Fam­i­ly ori­ent­ed busi­ness­es are the ones that car­ry on to the next gen­er­a­tion which will in turn ex­pand and im­prove as we have seen here to­day." 

Denise Chin­pire-O'Rei­ley, the CEO of D's Pu­ja Store and the im­me­di­ate past pres­i­dent of the In­sti­tute of Char­tered Ac­coun­tants of T&T (ICATT) said there is a grow­ing mar­ket for faith-based goods. 

Chin­pire said, "We de­cid­ed to ex­pand be­cause we re-vis­it­ed our busi­ness mod­el to serve the mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty dif­fer­ent­ly.  Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers are ask­ing for some­thing dif­fer­ent. They want mod­ern fa­cil­i­ties. They want easy ac­cess to items. There is al­ways the need to have more prayers in this world and the re­li­gious sup­ply mar­ket is con­stant­ly grow­ing an­nu­al­ly." The busi­ness was start­ed 20 years ago by KS Chin­pire. The fam­i­ly made a sub­stan­tial in­vest­ment to ex­pand and mod­ern­ize the fa­cil­i­ties.