As the world celebrated Easter, retailers in Port Harcourt have lamented the drop in sales compared to last year’s Easter.
Some of the retailers that include supermarket owners, cinema and eatery managers said in an interview that this year’s sales affected them badly.
The branch manager of a well-know super mart in Port Harcourt said the increase in the value of dollars, affected their sales this year.
“The way we get our statistics right is through checking the level of consumption according to the consumers’ profession. The high income earners come once in two weeks or three weeks to purchase a large amount of what they need.
” The middle and low income earners come basically every week or two weeks to purchase in small quantities.
” Now when the valuation of dollars go up, it automatically affect the prices of what we sell, so prices go up. When dollars come down, prices of things we sell reduce as well.
” So, this year, because of the high valuation of dollars, we sold less, because most of our consumers reduce or increase the amount of what they buy depending if they purchased at a lower or higher price.”
However, an eatery manager said the reason why this year’s sales were poor was because of the hard economy.
“Presently, we know that the economy is currently not favourable to a lot of people. Most people have lost their jobs, some are managing the ones they have, some people’s salaries have been slashed and these people would automatically have to try as much as possible to save in order to make ends meet.”
Meanwhile, a mall manager affirmed that it was indeed the economic situation in the country that affected the level of consumption in this year’s Easter sales.
