December sales were high for most

By Martin Hellicar

WHILE the festive season provided the expected cash bonanza for most shops, for other outlets poor takings proved to be the final straw pushing them to protest action.

Major high-street shops yesterday reported satisfactory business over the last few weeks of 1998. But owners of shops along old Nicosia’s pedestrian thoroughfares are so disgruntled they are planning a protest shut-down.

Shop owners along Ledra and Onasagorou street are to close their doors at 11 am on Wednesday January 27 – two hours early – and march on the Town hall to hand over a petition to Nicosia Mayor Lellos Demetriades.

The vexed shopkeepers say pedestrianisation has crippled their business. They want the municipality to take action to fill their cash-registers.

“We call all shopkeepers in the area but also concerned residents who suffer with us to gather in Phaneromeni square to approve a petition and then march down Ledra street to the municipality to hand over the petition, ” Trifonas Neocleous, of shopkeepers’ union Povek, said yesterday.

Neocleous said the municipality had turned a deaf ear to shop owners’ repeated pleas for support.

The feeling among managers of major high-street shops was more positive.

“Good,” was the reply of one department store manager when asked what takings had been like over the festive season.

“The general feeling around, concerning the last two months of the year, is that business was satisfactory,” the manager of a chain of large Nicosia general stores said.

He said takings had been about the same as for the same period the year before.

The response was similar from other major outlets.

Also yesterday, Povek confirmed that the Commerce Ministry had decided to allow shops to begin their winter sales two weeks early, on January 18.

Neocleous said the ministry had decided to sanction the early start to sales because it was unable to prevent shops flouting the law and putting the “sale” signs up early.

The Commerce Minister, Nicos Rolandis, is by law empowered to bring forward the start date for winter sales – set as the first Monday in February – by 15 days.

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