GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

The eco­nom­ic down­turn has claimed two more ca­su­al­ties in T&T’s busi­ness land­scape, with Movi­eTowne clos­ing its To­ba­go cin­e­ma and The Home Store clos­ing its Ch­agua­nas branch.

Movi­eTowne chair­man, Derek Chin, con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the To­ba­go lo­ca­tion had shut its doors, end­ing near­ly a decade of op­er­a­tions on the is­land.

De­spite eight years in the mar­ket, the cin­e­ma nev­er turned a prof­it, even af­ter man­age­ment in­tro­duced re­duced tick­et prices to at­tract pa­trons.

Chin ex­plained that the fa­cil­i­ty re­quired sig­nif­i­cant up­grades—in­clud­ing new pro­jec­tors, seat­ing, and screens—but the cost of re­fur­bish­ment was too high giv­en the lack of growth.

“It has nev­er been a prof­itable. We ran it there and we tried. There were re­duced prices, every kind of things but they don’t seem to be mov­ing in the way we thought they would. So we nev­er got to the lev­el that it was eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able.

“But we per­se­vered, we tried, and then we re­alised it doesn’t make sense be­cause for us to restart it again...We have to re­fur­bish and that is go­ing to be too ex­pen­sive to re­fur­bish, change pro­tec­tors, change seat­ing and things like that be­cause it was ob­vi­ous we just need to have an up­grade. So the de­ci­sion whether to up­grade or not to up­grade was made, and that’s why we de­cid­ed to shut it down,” Chin said.

He al­so point­ed to glob­al in­dus­try changes, not­ing that stream­ing ser­vices and home the­atres have re­shaped how au­di­ences con­sume films.

This un­cer­tain­ty has made the com­pa­ny more cau­tious with in­vest­ments.

“We have to be care­ful in our in­vest­ments es­pe­cial­ly this time with the tech­nol­o­gy com­ing and chang­ing peo­ple’s ways of go­ing to movie. Of course, we are look­ing on at what Net­flix and Warn­er Broth­ers and Para­mount are do­ing. Would that af­fect us in terms of con­tent? Things like that, you know... We were sup­posed to go to M6, but again, the same sit­u­a­tion. You know, the busi­ness has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly, the in­dus­try has changed, not like what it was be­fore,” Chin said.

Re­gard­ing the fu­ture of its em­ploy­ees, he said the To­ba­go clo­sure af­fect­ed a small team of about six to sev­en em­ploy­ees, with Movi­eTowne ex­plor­ing op­tions for re­as­sign­ment or re­trench­ment pack­ages.

While the To­ba­go chap­ter has end­ed, the com­pa­ny is shift­ing its fo­cus to Guyana, where op­er­a­tions are thriv­ing and ex­pan­sion be­yond George­town is be­ing con­sid­ered.

“For Guyana, I have to meet some­one there, prob­a­bly lat­er this month, and then we will de­cide if it’s some­thing that we want to do or not to do,” Chin added.

In Trinidad, Movi­eTowne con­tin­ues to op­er­ate at Port-of-Spain and the C3 Cen­tre in San Fer­nan­do.

Mean­while, The Home Store has an­nounced the clo­sure of its Ch­agua­nas branch at Pen­ny­wise Plaza, ef­fec­tive Jan­u­ary 5, 2026.

In a no­tice post­ed on so­cial me­dia, the com­pa­ny cit­ed the “con­tin­ued de­cline in the econ­o­my” as the pri­ma­ry rea­son for the de­ci­sion.

The re­tail­er had main­tained a pres­ence in Ch­agua­nas for sev­er­al years, but would con­tin­ue op­er­a­tions at its Barataria branch.

These clo­sures high­light the mount­ing chal­lenges faced by busi­ness­es across sec­tors, as de­clin­ing con­sumer spend­ing and shift­ing mar­ket trends force com­pa­nies to scale back op­er­a­tions.