Not affected middle class, feel Margao residents
MARGAO: The proprietor of Café Tato restaurant in Margao said demonetisation did not affect his business at all.
“The number of people coming to my restaurant has decreased but that could be because more restaurants were opening in the city,” he said.
Owners of Radha Medicals, Margao also did not find any change due to demonization. “The only problem we had was the long queues to deposit the money and given the fact that medical stores had a relaxation, customers would exchange their banned notes at our store instead of going to the bank,” he said.
Owner of Lolienkar’s, a retail shop in New Market also felt there was no difference on his business. “
We gave goods on credit to our regular customers and many of our customers paid us by cheque as they purchase a lot of stock from us,” Lolienkar pointed out.
For Aparna Tengse, a homemaker there was no difference because she never keeps money, especially big notes at home. “I used the ATM card to withdraw money and credit card to make payments, so there was no problem for me,” she said.
She opined that the middle class was not affected and only those in the habit of stacking lot of money may have problem. After all the common man does not have black money so he did not suffer, she said.
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Vasco yet to revive from impact of demonetisation
VASCO: From a vegetable vendor to a cloth merchant and those involved in either selling building materials or were involved in building industry have claimed that their sales had dropped and all attempts to revive business had gone in vain.
“There is no doubt that the impact of demonetisation was more on the building industry and the effect still exists. Many of the small builders or contractors from Vasco have even given up their business and have shifted their focus on land deals for their survival. Big builders have no clients and hence they are also not taking up any new projects. The implementation of GST is like nail in coffin,” said a Vasco-based builder Nazir Kha.
Raising similar concerns, Kishan Sankolkar, owner of National Selection cloth stores said their business had come down by 20 to 25 per cent and it is slow even at present. Yes, there is business, but not the way it was earlier and to overcome the losses, we have tried to introduce ‘discount sale offers’ to pull customers,” he said.
Hitesh Patel, a south-Goa based distributor for laminates, however sounded hopeful. “Since we were already in the systematic channel with 100 per cent billing, we didn’t encounter many problems in switching over to the new system. However, our sales dropped due to other factors in the market. As sale of plywood and laminates are linked to each other, since the sale of plywood dropped, even our sales dropped,” he said.
