Has the crisis impacted on all?

(KPL) After spending hours in preparing the various types of fruits for sale from his portable fruit cart, Mr. Phet starts his day by pushing it along the streets to hawk sliced sour and sweet fruits. 
Mangoes, jujubes, tamarinds, pineapples and guavas are the favourites of this hawkers� customers. You can order saltish or sweetened sauce laced with hot chilli powder to minimise the sourness of some of the very sour fruits. 
The bulk of the customers of Mr. Phet or Khamphet Vonglath are not the ordinary pedestrians of Vientiane but university students reading for the various disciplines at the National University of Laos in Dongdok, located in the outskirts of Vientiane. 
What Mr. Phet does on a day to day basis in the recent days is similar to what he had been doing for the last eight years but the main difference is that he is hawking his fruits at a time when the world is in its worst financial crisis since the end of the Great Depression. 
He earns less today from his fruit cart hawking business than he did last year and the past years. Nowadays, his daily earning is around 60,000 kip or approximately eight US dollars.
Mr. Phet said that in the past years, for his investment of 100,000 kip he could enjoy 100 per cent profit or make a profit of 100,000 kip but for the present his profit margin is down to only half of such a lucrative margin.
Commenting on his present level of daily earnings he said,� Years ago I had my bad days but they were not as bad as the low earnings of this year.� 
Many years ago the fruit cart business or Loh Kading in Lao (the Lao name comes from kading or �bell� that the hawkers use to ring to attract the attention of their customers when they move along the streets or lanes) was one of the most lucrative small business ventures. Their daily earning could be as high as 200 per cent of their investment on purchase of fruits and other miscelleanous expenses.
However, today the fruit cart hawkers complain about falling sales volume.
Because people got to know that the fruit cart business is lucrative and so many people went into it and Mr Phet faced stiff competition. But, many fruit cart hawkers, especially the new ones did not know that 2009 would turn out to be a bad year and up to date they had dismal daily earnings. 
For Mr. Phet, the fruit cart business is his bread and butter. He operates it even on weekends. The earnings from his fruit cart over the past years had been used for the building of his bungalow, to pay the tuition fees for his four�year English degree course at the National University of Laos and to support his wife and two sons. 
Most of fruits of Mr. Phet and other fruit cart hawkers are imported from Thailand. So any increase in the prices of the fruits they buy would bring about reduced earnings.Mr. Phet summed up the reasons for his lower level of earnings: increase in the prices of fruits (around 40 per cent ), his customers are retrenching and a long and cool monsoon season. 

CONSTANT DAILY INVESTMENT 
Mr. Keo, another fruit cart operator who hawks in a downtown area in Vientiane said that presently his daily profit is around 50,000 to 60,000 kip per day but on some days he does not make any money at all although his daily capital investment comes to 200,000 kip. 
�Compared to last year my daily purchase of sliced fruit is a little higher and it is just over 3,000 kip, said Mr. Phone Thammavong, a third year student of sanitation management of the Faculty of Management of the College of Health Sciences.
�I like the jujube fruit. My expenses on sliced fruit has increased a little bit,� said Ms. Nang Insoulivong, a second year student of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the College of Health Science. 
I have cut down on my purchases of sliced fruits this year because I want to be sure that I have enough money for my education, said Mr. Linhengsongjeu Vasaiki, a second year student of business software, Pakpasak Technical School. �I just spend around 8,000 kip a week, which is just 3,000 kip higher than last year but I get less fruit for more money,� he added.

OTHER JOBS 
Although Mr Phet will graduate this year and so he can look for a white collar job but he commented that his hawking business is still a useful standby occupation. 
Fruit cart operators can still survive on their earnings and this was said by Mr. Kong, a fruit cart operator from Ban Nong Panay, Sikhotabong district and he added that he would hang on to it even though the economic situatison in the world would be worsening in the months to come and perhaps, in the next few years. One can say that Mr Phet and his peers should consider themselves to be fortunate as they still enjoy the fruits of their labour and they earn money on most days. 
While they earn less than during the good days of the recent past but it is not to say that they do not earn anything at all: a far cry from the present track record of many of the giant banks of the western world and some had even collapsed like nine pins.

back