COVID displacement spawns mobile liquor shop

After being laid off from his job as a contractor seven months ago due to the COVID-19 outbreak, James Morrison was left with no choice but to devise a way to support himself and help care for his grandchildren.

The quickest remedy to Morrison’s financial constraint was ‘the walking shop’, as many locals in the Wakefield district of St Catherine now refers to it.

Despite the fact that he is not actually walking with a haul of goods on his back, Morrison serves the community by loading crates of soft drinks, energy drinks, and liquor, as well as an igloo, into the back of his car and travels up and down the hills within the community to earn money, while meeting the needs of the people.

So far, so good, he said of his venture, as the business reels in a suitable profit that has seen him through thus far. “You haffi do something to gwan survive,” he told The Gleaner of his four-month-old business.

Morrison reports that he is greatly accepted by the community members, who frequently request his services at all hours of the day and night, whether it is to pour a single drink for a man on the road or to park at a small family gathering within the area to serve liquor.

“Any weh the party deh me go deh go park up,” he said.

“Me deh all inna me bed and me have fi liff up [and] go sell them some rum,” Morrison added, explaining that his mobile shop, which is currently his only source of income, is heavily utilised after the shops in the town have closed for the night.

“Me cah complain, because me can eat and put one and two together,” he said.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the containment measures implemented to control its spread have negatively impacted employment.

The Statistical Institute of Jamaica’s 2020 quarterly Labour Force Survey, titled ‘The Jamaican Labour Market: Impact of COVID-19’, reported that 161,300 people were unemployed in July 2020, with 80,500 of them being male.

The study, which assessed the effects of the pandemic on households’ sources of income and the coping strategies individuals used to compensate for job losses, found that the Government of Jamaica’s COVID-19 control measures resulted in widespread work disruptions, causing some businesses to reduce their activities, which included temporary and permanent lay-offs.

In July 2020, the unemployment rate was 12.6 per cent, which was 4.8 percentage points higher than the 7.8 per cent recorded in July 2019.