There’s
an issue growing on our society about the existence of street vendors. Some say
that they give more disadvantage than the benefit. Because of that people who buy from them
should be fined to decrease the street vendor’s customer. But is it really like
that? Is it that important to make the vendor’s customer pay fine?
What
are street vendors actually? Street vendors are people who sell stuffs like
food, beverage, toy, newspaper, etc on the public road. They walk along the
road while offering their stuff to the road users such as drivers and
pedestrians. The vendors usually carry their stuff with them while selling on
the road, but there are also some of them who sell on the pedestrian walk. If
there are customers who need to buy things from them, they could easily find
the street vendor on the road and do the transaction right at that place. The
vendors don’t need to pay for a stall and government tax. That’s why they could
sell their stuffs with a lower price.
Then,
why does some people in the society dislike the street vendors? The main cause
is that the street vendors use the public road. The road is built to accomodate
vehicle users. So, when the street vendors use the road to sell things, it
would disturb the road users. Maybe one or two vendors wouldn’t be a much
disturbance, but as you know most of the roads in Indonesia’s big cities are
filled with street vendors. The driver would stop for a while in the middle of
the road to buy from the vendor. Of course this would cause the road to be
blocked. In a serious case, it can also cause a traffic jam. Beside that, the
existence of the street vendors can also disturb the city’s scenery. Why? We
all know that some of Indonesian citizen haven’t been able to keep the
environment clean, in this case, the buyers of the street vendors usually
throw the rubbish from things they’ve
bought on the road randomly. This would pollute the city’s environment. Overall,
the street vendors could decrease the public comfort.
Beside
all of those negative effects from street vendor, maybe it would be better for
us to know the positive effect too, right? Do you realize that people who work
as the street vendors are usually come from middle-low economic society? So, by
letting them work as these vendors, it means that we also give income for their
living. It is better than being a jobless citizen right? Just imagine if the
government banned them, how many people will loose their job? How many people
will loose income for their family?
Now,
back to the topic whether the people who buy from street vendor should be fined
or not. The advantage from this policy is that it would decrease the vendor’s
customer. Because of this, the vendor would change their occupation into a job
that hopefully wouldn’t disturb the public comfort anymore. But the disadvantage
from this policy is that it would decrease the vendor’s income for their living.
The worst effect is it could cause the number of jobless citizen to rise.
Personally,
I do not agree with the policy of having the street vendor’s customer to be
fined. I think the policy is not too effective. The supervision toward this
policy is difficult to be done. In the end, it wouldn’t affect much things. I
think that the better solution for this problem is to do a relocation. The
government could provide these vendors a new place (such as special market) so
that they don’t need to sell on the road. It can save the vendor’s income and the
public comfort all at once. This way wouldn’t damage the two sides too much. But
I do agree that something should be done to solve this problem so that all of
the citizen could live comfortably.
