Raphael John-Lall

T&T’s footwear cus­tomers have con­tin­ued to spend their mon­ey on shoes de­spite the down­turn in the econ­o­my, ac­cord­ing to Jerus Mo­hammed, coun­try man­ag­er, Pay­less Shoe Source.

“Our T&T cus­tomers have al­ways had a high spend­ing pow­er. With the eco­nom­ic down­turn we have seen that rate re­duced, how­ev­er, shoes are a ne­ces­si­ty in T&T and we have to wear shoes, every­one has to wear shoes. So in­stead of buy­ing three pairs of shoes, we have found that our cus­tomers buy two, but we still do ex­treme­ly well here,” he told the me­dia yes­ter­day.

Mo­hammed was speak­ing at the open­ing of their new su­per store in Trinci­ty Mall.

Pay­less Shoe Source opened its first su­per store in the Eng­lish speak­ing Caribbean yes­ter­day at Trinci­ty Mall, which brings the to­tal num­ber of stores to 22 in T&T.

Pay­less Shoe Source is the num­ber one spe­cial­i­ty footwear re­tail­er in the Unit­ed States and one of the world’s largest.

The new store is con­tained in 4,682 square feet on the up­per lev­el of the mall and is twice the size of a stan­dard Pay­less store.

Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion from Pay­less, the su­per store con­cept is de­signed to give cus­tomers a more com­fort­able shop­ping ex­pe­ri­ence with wider aisles, more cashiers, more staff and more styles with over 25,000 pairs of shoes in stock at that branch.

Mo­hammed said their women’s ca­reer shoes is the most pop­u­lar seg­ment.

Denise Bernard, vice pres­i­dent, Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean re­gion for Pay­less Shoe Source, who al­so spoke at the event, de­scribed a su­per store as “a wide ar­ray of shoes that we could not fit in­to a con­ven­tion­al store.”

She said they had a “soft open­ing” on Wednes­day and since then 2,400 cus­tomers have vis­it­ed the store.

“That is a tes­ta­ment as to the loy­al­ty of our T&T cus­tomers and how faith­ful they are to us.”

She said they opened the su­per store based on feed­back from cus­tomers.

“There was a need for more sizes, there was a need for more depth in the prod­uct and more va­ri­ety. What large for­mat stores as this one do is give us the pos­si­bil­i­ty to bring that so­lu­tion. This has made us the au­thor­i­ty in footwear in T&T and in all of the Caribbean.”

Scores of cus­tomers filed in­to the store af­ter the launch.

Ann-Marie, who was ac­com­pa­nied by her daugh­ter, told Guardian Me­dia that they usu­al­ly buy all their shoes at Pay­less and came to the new su­per store to see what bar­gains that they could have got­ten.

“We al­ways check out the sales and the styles we want. We al­ways go to the store in Mau­si­ca but to­day we came to this one to see the va­ri­ety. This one is much big­ger than the one in Mau­si­ca and the prices are rea­son­able.”

An­oth­er shop­per, who iden­ti­fied him­self on­ly as Kelvin, said there was not much dif­fer­ence with oth­er shoe stores.

‘This one re­al­ly big for sure but oth­er than that I do not see the big dif­fer­ence with oth­er lo­cal stores. It is about the same prices,” he said.