Shop opening in Vaitele

By Mathias Huckert 21 June 2016, 12:00AM

Sometimes, a small change can mean a lot to the community. With a new shop called “Fia’s Minimart and BBQ Shop, which opened in Vaitele yesterday, the village is provided with one more attraction in the future.

For the shop’s owners, Afamasaga and Fia Sapolu, the experience of running a shop is not a completely new one: “We owned a shop before, which was located just on the other side of the road.

But our new shop here is much bigger, so therefore we are able to provide a vast variety of goods for our future costumers. Also, we were ready to extend our business with simply moving it to a better and bigger location”, Fia Sapolu explained.

Indeed, the shop already welcomed its first customers in the morning, when the entrance was decorated with a huge number of colourful balloons, marking the shops first official day of opening.

According to Fia Sapolu, the celebration of the opening was nonetheless a rather small one: “We invited some family members and some close friends and had a small ceremony and a breakfast together. But there’s much work coming up with an opening of this kind, so the time to celebrate was of course limited”.

With the upcoming work in mind, the two shop owners can always count on the family.

“We have to do all the price tagging for our newly delivered goods but at the same time, somebody must have an eye on our costumer’s welfare and the checkout area also has to be looked after, so that’s why our sons help us out a little bit”.

As Afamasaga Sapolu pointed out, the difficulties that come along with the shop opening in Vaitele are not as hard as one might expect them to be. “Of course there are other shops in the area we have to compete with.

But we just have to see how this turns out for us, as we just now opened the shop. For us, it is certainly an advantage to provide the opportunity for the costumer to actually select the goods they want to buy by walking through our shop, so this might be much easier for us to operate with”.

But the newly opened shop in Vaitele does not only offer goods for the costumers. In a separate room right next to the shop, a new barbecue restaurant is included, offering a delicious variety of meat specialties for hungry grocery shoppers.

“With our barbecue, we can provide freshly grilled meat for the customers to take away, operating six days a week.

This barbecue was one of the main points for us to extend our business, because we know how much the people love fresh food”, Afamasaga Sapolu concluded.

By Mathias Huckert 21 June 2016, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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