PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

De­spite some hold­ing reser­va­tions about busi­ness in the cap­i­tal, Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd (PHL) has said it will con­tin­ue to in­vest in its Port-of-Spain op­er­a­tions.

On Thurs­day, the com­pa­ny un­veiled a re­design of its Sub­way branch on Queen and Ed­ward Street cor­ner, the 11th in its on­go­ing pro­gramme to re­vi­talise the brand in T&T.

Some have raised con­cern about busi­ness in Port-of-Spain, with oth­ers not­ing that com­mer­cial com­plex­es are open­ing and thriv­ing out­side the city, but PHL CEO Si­mon Hardy how­ev­er stressed that the city is still a ma­jor hub of ac­tiv­i­ty.

"We have to be where peo­ple are, and peo­ple work in down­town Port of Spain, and they need to eat. So we have to be close to where the ac­tion is, and we are com­mit­ted to keep in­vest­ing in down­town Port of Spain. We have two more to do. We have stores on Hen­ry Street and Fred­er­ick Street, and so there will be any next pro­gramme. I'm not ex­act­ly sure ex­act­ly when those will be done, but they are go­ing to be com­ing still," said Hardy.

Sub­way vice pres­i­dent for T&T op­er­a­tions, Jo­hann Men­doza, said the com­pa­ny had spent $1.7 mil­lion dol­lars on the re­brand at the Queen Street restau­rant, not­ing it was a bit more dif­fi­cult than pre­vi­ous projects be­cause it was a lega­cy build­ing.

"This one we had to be very care­ful. The de­signs and so on had to be care­ful­ly done to pre­serve the his­toric in­tegri­ty of the build­ing while still adding some Sub­way flair. So we've main­tained the fa­cade for the most part with the awnings, the lat­tice work, the stone work on the out­side has just been cleaned up. We couldn't even use pow­er wash­ers for it. But all that took some ex­tra time and mon­ey," said Men­doza, who said that the Sub­way team had worked to en­sure for­eign ex­change ex­pend­ed on the project was kept to a min­i­mum.

He said, "I would say just about $1.7 mil­lion in to­tal. Just about on­ly a quar­ter of that was through forex, but 75 per cent of it is on lo­cal TT dol­lars, pump­ing mon­ey back in­to the lo­cal econ­o­my. You know, with lo­cal con­struc­tion, lo­cal sign mak­ing, all these oth­er things. A lot of stuff lo­cal­ly done. The main equip­ment from Sub­way would have been im­port­ed, yes, but the ma­jor­i­ty of the work is re­al­ly through lo­cal in­dus­try."

Port-of-Spain may­or Chin­ua Al­leyne said he was hap­py a mem­ber of cor­po­rate T&T had in­vest­ed in restor­ing such a build­ing, giv­en its im­por­tance to the city's iden­ti­ty.

"Build­ings such as these re­al­ly lend to the char­ac­ter of the city. It's a re­al­ly good op­por­tu­ni­ty for tourists and oth­ers as they vis­it the city to see the di­ver­si­ty of our ar­chi­tec­ture and the di­ver­si­ty of the his­to­ry. So for Sub­way to re­al­ly look at en­sur­ing that they pre­serve that his­to­ry, pre­serve that ar­chi­tec­ture, and put a mod­ern flair on it as well is re­al­ly im­por­tant to us," said the may­or.

The PHL CEO al­so ac­knowl­edged there was some back­lash fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment of price in­creas­es for an­oth­er pop­u­lar fran­chise; KFC.

'"Price in­creas­es are nev­er pop­u­lar in any­one's book, but we al­ways have to bal­ance the needs of the con­sumer with al­so try­ing to bal­ance our fi­nan­cial sta­tus. I think we've tak­en a pret­ty mea­sured, bal­anced ap­proach. So that's all I have to say on that," said Hardy.