Pizzeria Il Carreto owner Elisa Sánchez has had to resort to creative marketing to draw customers to her recently opened restaurant. Daily Sun/Humberto Trías
June 7, 2010 – Puerto Rico Daily Sun, Economy
Sitting at a window-side table in Pizzeria Il Carretto, a five-month-old organic Italian restaurant on Ponce de León Avenue in Río Piedras, the heavy Italian aromas and jazz music contrast sharply with the quiet scene outside.
With the help of a friend, Sánchez opened the 1,200 square-foot restaurant in February of this year at an investment of $42,000, with three employees, to a relatively healthy local economic environment.
Several months ago, “people were walking back to get on the train and go home during this time,” she said, looking out onto the sparsely populated sidewalk. “Now with the strike, no one commutes anymore.”
Many of the students and teachers at the University commute daily during the school year via the Río Piedras Tren Urbano station.
Already a month and a half into the strike, the only good business day was the day the general strike took place, she said, when unions took a stand for the student protest and drove thousands of people into Río Piedras, consented local business leaders.
It seems that none of the nearly 200 students protesting inside of the university gates — who cannot leave due to a police order that prohibits their reentry — buy anything, including food, in Río Piedras.
“Most of my market was University students,” said Sánchez, who supports the strike, yet hopes that it is resolved soon.
In response to the decrease in business, she has tried marketing Il Carretto in other ways to make up the lost revenue.
“I have hired Jannet Rolón, a mime, to hand out flyers advertising the restaurant,” she said, citing one of the more unusual methods she has employed to reach new markets. “The people who come here now are those who care about organic and quality food,” she said.
Sánchez has also employed a Facebook page and implemented two movie nights a week, where she projects Chaplin movies on Mondays and classic Italian movies on Wednesdays, to help drive customers, both locals from Río Piedras and from outside of the area, into the restaurant.
To catch all of the business possible, and to keep the street lively, she keeps her kitchen open until 11 p.m. every night except Sundays. Río, another new restaurant on the same block, keeps its kitchen open till midnight.
In support of the student protest, and in an attempt to reach out to the remaining students in the area, Sánchez frequently donates individual pizzas to the students who are staked-out inside of the University gates.
However, college students can’t survive more than a month living just off of individual pizzas donated several times a month.
“We got a lot of our food donated from the [Association of Puerto Rico University Professors] and from parents of student protestors,” said one UPR-Río Piedras student, who is no longer protesting and wished to remain anonymous citing his recently landed job. “I couldn’t leave because of the police, so I don’t know where they got the food from,” he said, speaking about the donators, adding that “sometimes” food came from local Río Piedras business.
Aside from the students that are locked behind the University gates, there have been groups of protesters in favor of the strike that congregate outside the gates, on the other side of the street, and in front of several other restaurants.
Crowds dwindle as strike continues
The longer the strike drags out, however, fewer numbers of people protest outside of the University gates. The day before the one-month anniversary of the strike, the only people involved in the protest outside of the gates was group of under 10 people who sat on the ground around a four piece, student jazz band.
“We almost don’t sell anything at all,” said a cashier at Pizza Mobile, who wished to remain anonymous. “There are some days, like the day the general strike took place, where we were busy,” she said. “But other than days like that, there just are not a lot of people around,” she added. Pizza Mobile opened just a week before the strike was announced and now employs five.
Restaurants aside, there are establishments in Río Piedras that have skirted the negative economic effects of the strike, or that are trying to shift their business to cater to the local community of Río Piedras.
La Chiwinha, a teashop and fair trade store on Calle González that has shown support for the protest, experienced a near 60 percent drop in revenue and said that its main clientele now is almost exclusively local community residents.
Joel Franqui, owner of La Chiwinha, explained that the student protest, and the lack of students in Río Piedras, is not an isolated problem that alone justifies the reduced business.
“People who live outside of Río Piedras have been concerned, or scared to come into Río Piedras because of the protest,” he said, citing that the side-effect of the strike has been one of the main issues in the decrease in business La Chiwinha has experienced.
“I think that the new businesses that are in front of the university [such as Pizza Mobile] have been doing really well,” he assumed. “They are closer to the University.”
Directly east of the university gates, Café 103 (@cafe1o3) is one of the many bars that crowd University Avenue, and regardless of their location, they too have had to cut back. Nearly costing them their status as a café, one cutback has been to stop opening at 10 a.m. and only open for nights, beginning at 5 p.m.
“On a normal day there are tens of thousands of people there every day who come and go and pass by,” said Jimmy Billoch, general manager at the café, recalling what “normal” days were like in front of the University where more than 18,000 students are enrolled.
“But now there are much less, only a couple of hundred who stay there,” he said, referring to the protestors inside of the University gates.
The only establishments that have not been effected negatively by the strike are the establishments that rely exclusively on the local, year-round residents of Río Piedras.
Fereteria López, a hardware store on the pedestrian-only section of the Paseo De Diego, an outside shopping area, has weathered the strike unscathed, noting no decrease in business from this time last year.
Frank Fashions, a clothing store next to Ferreteria López that caters to the youth market, has seen a “significant” drop in sales, according to a cashier who wished to remain anonymous.
Yamaris Cruz, a cashier at Bang-on and a graduate of the UPR-Río Piedras — who is opposed to the strike — explained that while the main clients of the store are University students, they are not the only people who buy from the store.
“Because of the location, most of the people who make purchases are students, but we get a lot of people who come in for gifts or for birthday presents,” she said. “What has really affected sales are the people who would have otherwise come in to the store to buy a shirt regularly, but who don’t come anymore because they are a part of the strike,” she explained.
Despite the close proximity that Bang-on has to the University, “Right now [the students] have other things on their mind,” she said. “They are concentrated on what they are fighting for, they are not thinking ‘wow, let me go get $25 so I can buy a cool shirt to wear at the strike!’” she explained.
However, Bang-on has been successful in reaching out to those students who are still willing to pay $25 for a shirt during the time of the strike, said Cruz. Aside from the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the store, “We have been making a lot of specialty shirts centered around the strike,” she said.
A simple shirt reading “Lucha si! Entrega no!,” which roughly translates to “Fight! Don’t give in!” hangs on the clean glass window that faces the street, as one example of that out outreach.
Bookstores might be the hardest hit of the industries that typically thrive around the University in Rio Piedras. “All strikes affect the business’ here more or less,” said Arnaldo González, general manager at Libreria Mágica, a bookstore on Ponce de León Avenue.
“Bookstores have been affected significantly,” he said. “But that does not mean we are not responding accordingly,”
To escape failure, some bookstores have been forced to change and adapt in creative ways. In the case of Libreria Mágica, it have begun hosting more workshops, book presentations and book and poetry readings.
Despite the increased efforts, González said that business was down a little less than 70 percent from this time last year.
Daisy Espinet, owner ofCafé 2012, a convenience store directly in front of Frank Fashions, blames the harsh economic climate in Río Piedras on a little bit of everything.
“It has to do with everything,” she said. “There is a lot less foot traffic now, but it began with the mass layoffs [of government workers] and has become worse with the strike,” she explained.
The University students were not her main clientele, but “they used to stop by and get lunch, or something from the store,” she said. “But the students don’t come anymore.”
Sebastian Humbert can be contacted via email at sebastianhumbert@yahoo.com or followed on twitter at http://twitter/sebastianhum.
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