Our sari-sari (variety) store

A typical sari-sari store in the Philipppines

One easy business to set up and manage is the sari-sari (variety) store. We had set up one in front of our house in Bacoor, Cavite, in the Philippines shortly before we came to Jeddah where we are currently working. The idea of putting up a sari-sari store dawned upon us after our child was born in 1997. I was then working as an editor with the newspaper Today in the financial district of Makati while my wife was working as a nurse at the Perpetual Help Medical Center in Las Pinas. Because we did not have a maid, we had to put our child to the care of my mother-in-law in Blumentritt, Sta. Cruz, Manila. 
We took the child home only once a week during my wife’s day off. You can imagine how difficult it was. On the eve of my wife’s day off, we had to go to Blumentritt to take the child. Since she worked on the morning shift as head nurse, she had to go to Blumentritt after work at 4 p.m., arriving in Blumentritt between 5 and 6 p.m. As an editor, I finished my work at 8:30 p.m. With our office in Makati, I usually arrived in Blumentritt at 9:30 p.m.
We would leave Blumentritt at 10:30 p.m. after dinner and got home in Bacoor at 11 p.m., or thereabout, by taxi. My mother-in-law loved her apo (grandchild) so much that if she ever heard any hint that we would transfer to an aircon bus in Lawton, she would admonish us: “Kung hindi ninyo ita-taxi ang bata hanggang Cavite, huwag na ninyong dalhin? (if you won't take the child by taxi up to Cavite, don't bring her to Cavite.)”
That’s how our sari-sari store was born. Experiencing the difficulty of taking our child to Cavite on the eve of my wife’s day off and taking her back to Blumentritt the following night, my wife and I decided that she quit her job and set up a sari-sari store instead. It was a gamble which paid off. The store earned an average of P200 a day in profit or P6,000 a month, which compensated for my wife’s lost salary. The bonus was that she had plenty of time to take care of our baby.
Setting up a sari-sari store requires a relatively small capital, depending on how big you want it to be. It our case, we spent P14,000 - - P7,000 for the building made of hollow blocks without the finishing and P7,000 for the goods we had to sell. The capital was part of our savings that had been dwindling since our daughter was born.
Our market consisted of a few neighbors in the small subdivision where we lived and two squatter families living along the highway near our home. Although our market was small, in three months’ time we recovered our capital. But the ROI or return of investment did not go back to the bank. It went our daily expenses in lieu of my wife’s lost salary.
Since we didn’t have a big capital, we could not get goods from wholesalers who could have given us discounts. With our P7,000 capital, we could only buy groceries from supermarkets in Binakayan which was about three kilometers from our place, and put a 15% markup for every item. We also had to replenish our stock every day. I had time to do it in the morning as my work at Today started at 2 p.m.
Although our prices were higher for the same goods in the supermarkets, we have managed to make our sales because a neighbor who needed only, say, a can of cooking oil or sardine will not go to Binakayan and spend more for fare. Considering that our regular market consisted of no more than 10 families and a few passersby you can imagine how much profit you will get if you had more buyers. Even small stores are profitable and not prone to lose unless someone in the family pockets money from the cash register.
In our case, we listed every item sold or we took for personal consumption to monitor our cash flow.