The Chamber of Commerce’s 12th annual Expo Fair officially opened this evening at the SJC Landivar Campus. But the country’s biggest trade show doesn’t begin until tomorrow at nine am - which is when 131 businesses will be offering too good to be true deals – on everything from cheap toilet paper in bulk – to $49 cell phones. We went to the SJC for a preview this evening and spoke to the Chamber’s Manager of Business Development Omar Ortiz.
Omar Ortiz, Manager of Business Development
“Right now we have everybody hustling, bustling to get ready and I can’t believe some of the deals that you will be having for instance for this year we have all the new auto dealers are also out here so we have Belize Diesel, Bravo, the older guys, and then we have the new little upstart Caribbean
Motors, Royal Motors. We have Marie Sharpe with her peppers, we have Brodies, Santiago Castillo, and we have Roses paper. You name it and it will be out here at the Expo and prices out here are usually slashed because everybody makes sure that they sell and sell as much as they possibly can.”
Karan Sabnani, Cellular World
“At Expo we have the best deals, the reason being because we believe this is the best time to give back to our customers. Tomorrow we have phones starting from $49 up. $49 for the phone, it is even cheaper than a cordless phone for your house. We have a lot of deals, we have about 65 models that we will have out here, the high end models that we have are the Iphone 3G, the HGC diamond, we have the Samsung Omna and those will be 30% to 40% off.”
Keith Swift,
For Cellular World, how important are these two days to you guys?
Karan Sabnani,
“These two days really, I would say it is even bigger than Christmas for us because really the image that we put out these two days, the amount of phones that we could move at these cheap prices, we know that customers will be our loyal customers for the rest of the year if they enjoy the deals at the Expo.”
Jorge Espat, Roses Paper Products
“We will be having special prices on the Regis four pack, we have a wrapper design on that product and then our signature brand the Roses will have a special case price on the Roses 500 and then also a very popular product the ‘My Choice’ value pack. So those are the products we will be selling at super deals tomorrow.”
Keith Swift,
Are you expecting to do good business and by the end of Sunday to make good sales?
Jorge Espat,
“I think for us it is not about making money, we are not going to be making money. It is giving back to the community.”
Omar Ortiz,
“Come every Expo, everybody comes out and everybody tries new products, everybody launches a lot of their new products as well and they let the Belizean public knows the type of goods they have so Expo is very important because for instance, I’ll use the paper company, they want everybody to know what types of paper are out there and so they come out and they showcase what they have.”
The prices to enter the Expo are $3 and $2. Again in line with new security measures, the Police and BDF will do a complete sweep of the area before gates are opened at 9. All visitors will have to pass through a metal detector. A K-9 unit will also be deployed and all that will be beefed up by 90 security personnel. More than seventeen thousand people attended last year’s Expo.
