Financial Times

Sathosa workers idle
Sri Lanka’s best known icon in the doldrums
By Quintus Perera
More than a year ago one of the largest go-downs of the CWE, converted into a major retail outlet at Welisara, was bustling with activity with hundreds of shoppers. Today, it’s like a haunted area with no buyers and rows of empty shelves.

When The Sunday Times FT visited the Sathosa model supermarket at Welisara last week, around 72 workers were present, some reading books others chatting while another group played cards but all wondered about their future.

Some of them said they were disillusioned about their future, due to the current political uncertainty in the country. Others said the government was partly to blame for the debacle at Sathosa.

Normally paid on the 25th of every month, these workers have not received their June salary as yet. Across Sathosa supermarkets there exists a total of 3,150 workers now idling as private sector managers pulled out from the organization last month. Meanwhile the government said last week that part of their salaries would be paid as workers demonstrated in Colombo over the payment issue.

At Welisara, there are huge refrigerators, cooling boxes used to display vegetable, fruit and meats and giant air-conditioned plants worth more than Rs. 100 million, now carelessly dumped in the backyard of the outlet. The workers said that these refrigerators and air-conditioners were removed from other large defunct CWE super markets to avoid paying rents if they were still stationed in those outlets.

The workers said that from the beginning of this outlet, daily sales were in the range of Rs 1.5 million while on weekends this amount topped the Rs 2 million mark.

The Welisara outlet has been operating under different conditions from other outlets with the independence to make purchases and payments in an atmosphere conducive to run the outlet successfully. At the time of privatisation the funds at its bank account showed a balance of around Rs 17 million, these workers pointed out.

Due to a large capital being tied down in various luxury items that were not moving, these funds have been siphoned to make further purchases and when there was a scarcity of essential items no buyers were visiting and within four months after privatisation the sales dropped drastically.

With the privatization all purchases and payments made through the Welisara outlet was stopped while everything was centrally operated from the head office. Workers said that the oversupply of luxury goods compared to essential items was one of the causes for the downfall of the CWE outlets.

They had repeatedly pointed out these daring shortcomings to the management but their advice was ignored. Some Rs. 8 million worth of perfumes alone have been returned to the suppliers and yet another Rs 8.5 million worth of perfumes are in the stores. Likewise they said that there are various other luxury items that are now stocked in the stores.Sales have slumped to just Rs. 400 to 500 per day from what was once the best CWE outlet in the country.

The workers said that when the administration of the outlet was led by the CWE head office, the security was the CWE itself and they were held responsible for checking the customer items, any shortages were charged from them. After privatisation the existing CWE security was done away with and in place the responsibility was handed over to a private security firm sans the responsibility of checking the goods of customers.

Now this huge retail sales outlet is left alone with no manager, no security guards with electricity, water and telephone lines cut off owing to non-payment of bills.

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