Making enough to continue the trade, assist children
“I SUFFER badly, usually on a day when it is slow and I have to turn around and sell whatever I have left, after five o’clock on a Saturday, very cheap,” Jody Ann Pottinger admitted.
Observing Pottinger in action, the impression is created that she is quite good at what she does. She would advertised her products by word of mouth to passing shoppers, a strategy that does not pay off some of the times, judging from the responses of passers-by.
“You see how hard it is selling in this market,” she said with a worried look on her face, after enduring a long period of not making a sale.
“I have to buy yellow yam for $70 per pound from the farmers in the field, and I can only sell it for $100 a pound in this market because of all the other vendors selling the same items. When you take out transportation [costs], I am left with hardly anything.”
Pottinger said that in her five years of vending, she has sold produce in the Coronation and St Ann’s Bay markets, and nowhere has she seen the level of cut-throat behaviour like in the Spanish Town Market.
Without disclosing her earnings from the business after four days of selling, for what she stated were security reasons, she said that despite this situation she will always go home with enough to continue her trade and assist with the children’s well-being.