Walk­ing west­wards through Queen Street to the epi­cen­tre of bar­gain prices and deals on Char­lotte Street/Chi­na­town, Port-of-Spain, the crowds be­came thick­er as last-minute Christ­mas shop­pers bought from heavy house­hold ap­pli­ances such as fridges, stoves, fur­ni­ture, tele­vi­sions on Queen and Hen­ry Streets, to lap­tops, elec­tron­ics, Christ­mas trees, Christ­mas lights, cur­tains and toys from stores and ven­dors alike.

Char­lotte Street was fes­tooned with ven­dors’ tents, pro­vi­sion ven­dors’ vans, and stalls on both sides of the road sell­ing the gamut from gold jew­ellery, DVDs, cur­tain rods, watch­es, bi­cy­cles, kitchen tow­els, mats, clothes, un­der­wear, watch­es, socks, slip­pers, pic­ture frames, vinyl, floor mats to snacks, pies, chow and nuts.

Busi­ness­men com­plained that they could not of­fload goods from their ve­hi­cles and trans­port vans could not de­liv­er goods as the ven­dors took up park­ing space on the road.

The ven­dors al­so had stalls on the pave­ment mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for pedes­tri­ans and shop­pers to nav­i­gate and en­ter brick and mor­tar busi­ness­es.

Some busi­ness own­ers blurred the line be­tween store own­er and ven­dor sell­ing their prod­ucts from their ve­hi­cles parked in front of their premis­es.

A pro­vi­sions ven­dor asked a cus­tomer if she had any oth­er bills oth­er than the old $100 bill.

Po­lice foot and ve­hi­cle pa­trols were no­tice­able. A slight show­er af­ter lunchtime caused pools of wa­ter to form in cer­tain ar­eas ex­ac­er­bat­ed by dis­card­ed sty­ro­foam food box­es.

There were on­ly three tar hams or soak and boil hams hang­ing from the rafters at Sing Chong Su­per­mar­ket on Char­lotte Street, the spe­cial­i­ty ham the su­per­mar­ket im­port­ed, and the stock on the shelf was go­ing down steadi­ly.

Fran­cis Ke­ung Fatt from the su­per­mar­ket said the frozen or smoked hams and turkey hams were al­so sell­ing well, there was a spe­cial on Cor­reia’s rum at two bot­tles for $100.

He said peo­ple were al­so pur­chas­ing a lot of wa­ter re­cent­ly, raisins cur­rents and prunes were pop­u­lar for mak­ing black cakes and fruit cakes.

Ke­ung Fatt said many peo­ple were mak­ing their own pastelles, so the su­per­mar­ket was sell­ing more corn­meal, mince­meat and pork.

He said while over­all sales were on­go­ing, they didn’t have a huge in­flux of peo­ple, but their loy­al cus­tomers were spend­ing and they were thank­ful for that.

Mel­ba Box­ill, the for­mer pres­i­dent of the Char­lotte Street Ven­dors’ As­so­ci­a­tion who is now work­ing with the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion’s man­age­ment team for Char­lotte Street said, “For this year on Char­lotte Street it is re­al­ly slow. In years past, there were more peo­ple buy­ing.”

“It is like the Grinch took Christ­mas this year. I don’t know why if it’s be­cause of the mon­ey chang­ing. On a pos­i­tive note, there are no neg­a­tive ac­tiv­i­ties that war­rant for the po­lice to be around. Char­lotte Street is calm, peo­ple are shop­ping freely, there are no purse and chain snatch­ers around. The name Gary Grif­fith caused the crim­i­nal el­e­ments to stay qui­et and peo­ple are com­fort­able shop­ping in town,” she said.

Crys­tal Daniel, a ladies un­der­gar­ment ven­dor said sales were very slow. She said the cur­ren­cy change to the new $100 poly­mer bill was mak­ing it worse.

She added the re­al­i­ty on the street was that many stores were not ac­cept­ing the old pa­per $100 bills, peo­ple were paid late or can’t ac­cess the new bills, spent time in long lines in the bank which had them frus­trat­ed and all cou­pled with a down­turn in the econ­o­my.

Com­ment­ing on the ar­rest of sev­er­al ven­dors on Queen Street on Fri­day, in­clud­ing David Nedd who was fined $900 by a Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trate on Mon­day, Daniel said, “He’s an il­le­gal ven­dor sell­ing on Queen Street, on­ly the ven­dors on Char­lotte Street are le­gal ven­dors.”

She con­tin­ued, “There are some ven­dors be­tween us who are il­le­gal ven­dors tak­ing a chance lay­ing a ta­ble and sell­ing and we haven’t seen any po­lice deal­ing with the il­le­git­i­mate ven­dors. We’re al­ready reg­is­tered with the cor­po­ra­tion for 2020 and can ply our trade on Char­lotte Street un­til De­cem­ber 31.”

A busi­ness­man said peo­ple on­ly got paid on De­cem­ber 20 and Char­lotte Street has al­ways been the place for last-minute shop­ping and bar­gains and mer­chants can­not sell their Christ­mas stocks in Jan­u­ary.

He said in gen­er­al, he was see­ing a flow but was not get­ting like a “mas band rush” like in years gone by.