Observations

Something the has interested me lately have been the abundance of very small scale business operations on the street. Two that stick out are are people selling coffee and people selling the use of cell phones. The cell phone booths are all over the city, and used it seems that people use them quite often. Some cell phone setups are simply a person on a plastic stool, a cell phone with a chain connecting it to the stool or the vendor. Sometimes there is no chain and sometimes there is a little canopy and a few phones and a clip board. There is a cell phone booth down the street from my posada, with a card table and a little canopy. sometimes there are maybe eight people crowded around it. Although it seems that everyone in Venezuela already owns a cell phone, the phone stores seem to always have people in them, these stands are all over. I will have to ask around to see how much less expensive they are, compared to the businesses owned by the phone companies that have up to 20 phone booths, located in commercial building spaces. The governments efforts to nationalize the communications corporations is especially interesting considering the obvious demand for communications by consumers and who owns the cellular companies now. I will have to do more research on who owns the companies now, and why the government wants to own them.