Jesse Ramdeo

Shop­pers took to sev­er­al pop­u­lar malls in north Trinidad yes­ter­day as gov­ern­ment’s re­cent re­lax­ation of COVID-19 re­stric­tions meant that they were able to restart shop­ping.

Cus­tomers, how­ev­er, were not the on­ly ones smil­ing be­neath their masks as store own­ers ex­pressed their joy to be back in busi­ness af­ter two months of closed doors.

Chris­t­ian Fer­min and Jo­hann Hus­bands, man­agers of NJ Sports, lo­cat­ed at Movi­etowne in Port-of-Spain, said they were elat­ed to re­move the chains from the store’s door and open it to the pub­lic.

“Joy­ous, ex­cit­ed...I’m glad to come back to work,” he said.

Hus­bands said be­ing cooped up at home and not be­ing able to earn an in­come had be­come frus­trat­ing.

“Ac­tu­al­ly leav­ing the house, earn­ing a dol­lar, it feels re­al­ly good and I am re­lieved to have opened back for busi­ness,” he said.

When a team from Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the store, both men were do­ing some last-minute clean­ing, un­pack­ing and putting the fi­nal touch­es to be­gin their first steps to­wards re­vival mode.

Ac­cept­ing that it won’t be busi­ness as usu­al go­ing for­ward, Fer­min ex­plained how the shop­ping ex­pe­ri­ence s ex­pect­ed to change.

“We still main­tain­ing so­cial dis­tanc­ing. We’re go­ing to put hand sani­tis­ers by the door, on­ly al­low­ing three peo­ple in the store and you have to wear a mask. No mask, no ser­vice.”

Fran­ka Phillip who jour­neyed from La Brea with her fam­i­ly de­scribed her vis­it to shop­ping out­lets as ‘re­fresh­ing’ but added that she won’t be tak­ing any un­nec­es­sary risks.

“For us, we have to con­tin­ue the so­cial dis­tanc­ing, the wash­ing of our hands we have to keep it safe, even though we get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to come out we have to stay safe.”

Man­ag­er of Fan Zone, Shiv­ani Ghany, said her heart was now set on re­con­nect­ing with cus­tomers.

“We al­ways en­gage with them when they come in­to the store so over the years we built re­la­tion­ships so much so that we know their wives, hus­bands, chil­dren even their grand­chil­dren so we missed that part in be­ing able to stay in touch with our cus­tomers.”

A vis­it to oth­er pop­u­lar shop­ping malls al­so paint­ed the grad­ual shift from a re­tail slump, as ve­hi­cle and cus­tomer traf­fic in­creased as com­pared to weeks ago.