Few customers at Sunday Bazaars

People cutting their budgets for the rest of the month due to Eid expenditures, said vendors.

LAHORE: The city’s Sunday Bazaars got fewer customers then before Eid-ul-Azha, complained some vendors on Sunday.

A survey of various Sunday Bazaars, conducted by The Express Tribune, revealed that the number of visitors remained less than half from previous weeks.

They said that due to Eid expenditures in the middle of the month, people were cutting their budgets for the remaining days. They said that they were expecting the strength of buyers to return to normal in the next month.

Some vendors said that another reason for the few customers was that many were still out of station due to the long weekend on Eid. They said that keeping this in mind, the Sunday Bazaar authorities had also not made the usual arrangements.Town officials, however, said that the arrangements in the bazaars could not be done properly since a number of workers were on Eid leave and had gone to their villages.

Aisha Iqbal, a housewife, told The Express Tribune that some vegetables were missing from the Sunday Bazaar.

Some of the available fruits and vegetables were not fresh, she said. She said that some vendors were selling fruits at higher prices than that prescribed by the City District Government of Lahore (CDGL). “They stop charging higher rates when they see the CDGL officials patrolling the market. As soon as they leave, these vendors return to the higher rate,” she said.

Rana Farhad, another buyer, said that he wasn’t buying many things from the Sunday Bazaar as his budget was low after spending money on sacrificial animals.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22^nd, 2010.