DESPITE the unpredictable weather last Sunday, participants during the One-Day Sinulog Street Fair reported good sales of their products.
A pizza vendor, Virginia Lopez, said she sold 150 boxes of pizza during the fiesta, which police estimated gathered some eight million spectators.
“Despite the rain, people flooded the streets to witness the grand parade, and with that we generated high sales,” Lopez said in a phone interview.
Before the Sinulog, Lopez told Sun.Star Cebu she planned to prepare only 50 boxes of pizza for the event. “I still don’t know if we’d be able to generate high sales on that day,” she had said. In 2008, Lopez said that only 10 boxes of pizza were sold because of the competition.
This year, she assessed her participation in the street fair as “quite good” since she earned more than the amount she invested. She invested about P10,000 for the one-day event.
Meanwhile, despite problems in the stall assignments, Alta Cebu Village Garden Resort, which joined the street fair for the first time, reported that they earned roughly P10,000 for the food items they sold during the event.
That was approximately P2,000 more than what they invested.
Ildebrando Velasquez of the Sinulog Foundation Inc. (SFI), organizer of the one-day street fair, said there were about 350 vendors who participated. About 98 percent of the participants opted to sell food items on the sidewalks along the carousel route.
“It was successful despite the weather. We haven’t heard complaints from the participants and the rules and regulations we set for the street fair were manageable,” Velasquez said in a phone interview.
The SFI earned more than P500,000 from the P1,500 registration fee collected from the 350 participating vendors. About P87,000 of the money collected went to the City Government for the business permits. The remaining amount paid for tables and umbrellas used in the street fair.
Velasquez added there are about 160 sponsors that also joined the one-day street fair.