The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Super Value's principal yesterday said his Abaco interests had coped well after eliminating the one-cent coin last year, and added: "We'll have to make it work here."

Rupert Roberts told Tribune Business that the retail industry and consumers will have to go through a period of adjustment given the Central Bank's plans to eliminate the one-cent as legal tender by end-2020, but acknowledged concerns that it was to costly to continue producing.

"It's going to be a hardship to us and our customers, but we knew it was coming. We knew it was just too expensive to continue to keep the penny," he said, revealing that his Maxwell's Supermarket had gone through a trial run last year when one-cent coins were in short supply on Abaco.

"We faced this with our store in Abaco last year where we could not get access to pennies due to lack of supply," Mr Roberts revealed. "We had to put $1,000 worth of American one-cent coins on our trailers in order to ensure our stores had them on hand.

"For the past year we were not able to get one-cent coins for our stores in Abaco, so what we did was revise prices upwards and downwards when we had to. As far as I know it worked well in Abaco so we are going to have to make it work here. Rounding our prices to five solved the problem, both upwards or downwards."

Chad Sawyer, Mr Roberts' business partner in Maxwell's, added: "We first ran into issues like variable weight produce, like meat and other produce that needed to be weighed, and then we also had price control issues. I think we can programme our scales to round to the nearest five cents again if we have to."

He suggested the government may have to alter price control regulations "because goods may be marked at a certain price level that would require it to be sold at a certain, set price, and two or three cents difference will be the difference in a profit or all-out loss on the controlled product if we have to keep prices within their price control range".

Mr Roberts added that the one-cent's elimination as legal payment tender was based on "a common understanding that the Central Bank just could not supply the Family Islands with pennies. We have even had problems with getting access to pennies in our New Providence stores".

He said his business had experienced similar challenges in dealing with the switch to value added tax (VAT), and said: "We had an issue with the transfer over to VAT, which amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in revenue lost, and that was just because of pennies.

"What this may do is this may [throw] the VAT out of hundreds of thousands of dollars or it may [throw] us as merchants out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The merchants may be the ones to suffer in the end."

John Rolle, the Central Bank's governor, has repeatedly said the one-cent coin's elimination will not impact price levels or VAT. The regulator has already reached out to the government's consumer protection and price control agencies to determine if the legislative and regulatory changes foreshadowed by Mr Sawyer are required.