High prices greet market shoppers

- Norman Grindley

Regular shoppers and vendors returned to Coronation Market yesterday, a week after they had abandoned the area following violent clashes between gunmen and the security forces.

Erica Virtue, Staff Reporter

IT WAS a regular market day, but not a regular market scene.

One week after a violent confrontation between gunmen and security forces in West Kingston halted shopping, Coronation Market was back in business yesterday, although vendors left consumers reeling from another shock.

The price of nearly all products had been hiked, by as much as 100 per cent on several items, as vendors tried to recoup heavy losses suffered when they fled the market, some leaving their goods behind for looters.

Several vendors who normally travelled from rural areas to sell at Coronation Market hadn't returned yesterday.

However, vendors and shoppers were equally unhappy as consumers balked at the high prices. As the vendors named their prices, shoppers responded with loud hissing of teeth. Escallion, sweet peppers and tomatoes moved beyond the reach of shoppers. Kizan Hibbert said that escallion prices had shot to $60 per pound, up from $30 last week, turning off shoppers.

"The people not buying because the price is high," she said yesterday. "Is the gunshot send up the prices of almost everything in the market."

She demanded compensation for market sellers.

"Just like how they set up a fund to bury the dead, people who lose their things because of the violence should be able to get some compensation," she said, adding that she lost thousands of dollars last week when she fled the market.

"I have to give (the goods) away because people wasn't buying anything. Everybody was running from gunshots," she said.

This week she too is trying to recoup some of the losses of last week, in an effort to send her two children to summer school, which should have started on Monday. She said that although the guns had stopped firing, not many of the regular market people had returned yesterday.

"The whole mess just make bad business for everybody," she said.

Sweet pepper, which according to shoppers usually sell for $20-$30 per pound, was up to $45 yesterday. Tomatoes moved from $10 per pound to $20.

Yam vendors too were having a difficult time. Philmore Robinson from Trelawny said his yam was selling for $30 to $35 per pound this weekend. Last week, it was $20 to $25 per pound. Another man from Trelawny sold his yam for $40 to $45 pound. Last week he sold yam for $20 to $25 per pound.

Some vendors reported losses up to $60,000. Melon vendor Garfield Fisher, who is from Manchester, said he fled last weekend leaving hundreds of pounds of melon and hundreds of dollars of losses. He said he had managed to leave some of the melons in a storeroom and with another vendor, but some of them spoilt. Last week he had been selling melon for $15 per pound. Yesterday his price was up to $25 per pound.

Although the long line of traffic parked on Darling Street indicated that several uptown shoppers had returned to the market, there were still open spaces on the road and empty stalls in the market. Those spaces would normally have been occupied on a Saturday. For them and others, the recent events are hard to brush aside.

"Is just because me talking now why (the sounds of gunshots) go away," vendor Bereta Hibbert said yesterday while shaking her head. "But since last Saturday me have a headache...When I sit down by myself I hear the shots in my head."

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