Lower Income Residents Can Shop for Free at This ‘Minimart’ at Woodlands

While the start of this week has been slightly disappointing due to the sudden rise in COVID-19 cases, there is still some good stuff that happened this week to celebrate.

Yes, I’m talking about the initiative that was started by the MP of Sembawang GRC for Woodlands, Mariam Jaafar. She excitedly announced on 13 July on Facebook that Store@Woodlands at Block 852 has been soft-launched on 5 July 2021, and the residents of Woodlands couldn’t be happier!

Lower-Income Residents Can Shop for Free at This ‘Minimart’ at Woodlands

Store@Woodlands is a minimart at Block 852 that was opened with the residents of Woodlands in mind. They can take up to nine items a month for free simply by heading down to the store, grabbing the items they want, and scanning their membership card.

How The Initiative Started

It all started a few months ago, when Mariam sat down with a few volunteers to convey her plan of setting up a community store.

While she was grateful that they have been able to give their beneficiaries food rations regularly, some of the items given to them are not exactly suited to their dietary requirements or taste. And this results in the beneficiaries having to give them away instead.

As such, Mariam’s vision of a minimart would allow the residents of Woodlands to take whatever they want, when they want it.

This would give them a greater selection of food items, and better cater to their needs whilst reducing wastage.

Items to be included in the store would be ingredients that are hardly found in food ration bags as well, like oyster sauce, kicap manis (Mariam’s personal favourite), chocolate, snacks, and such.

With a vision in mind, they started coming up with a plan and began work to turn their vision into reality.

Setting Up The Store

Mariam and her team of volunteers reached out to potential donors in their community. Woodlands Digital Office started developing a POS and inventory tracking system by themselves, while their welfare team settled the logistics of the store, like getting shelves and looking for storage space.

Membership cards, logos, posters, and signs were also designed by Woodlands Design Studio for the residents.

Once the food items started coming in, their food ration volunteers “spent nights” putting a barcode on each item and stocking the shelves up. Mariam even shared that many of their volunteers were seniors.

Soon, the store was ready for a soft launch, and the team was excited to see how it would fare amongst the residents.

The store now has a whopping 1,800 items on its shelves, and there are more in storage to cater to the needs of the residents. According to Mariam, Nutella seems to be a popular choice amongst them as it is “flying off the shelves”.

Some of the other items that are available include:

• Bee hoon
• Biscuits
• Canned food
• Cooking oil
• Instant noodles
• Jam
• Rice
• Toiletries

Official Launch

Mariam and her team of volunteers are currently hard at work and trying to prepare the community gardens so that it is just in time for their official launch on 1 August 2021, Sunday.

With the addition of the community gardens to the store, residents of Woodlands will be able to get fresh vegetables as part of their selection from the minimart.

How To Donate

If you are keen to make a contribution to Store@Woodlands, you can do so by donating food and other essential items at the following locations:

• Block 852, #01-103
  • Last Sunday of the month, 12pm to 3pm
• Woodlands CC
  • Daily, 10am to 10pm
• All RC Centres
  • Monday, 4pm to 8pm
  • Wednesday, 4pm to 8pm
  • Saturday, 10am to 1pm

Your donated items will be collected and brought to Store@Woodlands once a week.

Alternatively, you can also make a financial donation online instead, via their Give Asia campaign.

Store Details

Address: Store@Woodlands at Block 852

Opening Hours: 

• Mondays, 7pm to 9pm
• Last Sunday of every month, 1pm to 3pm

You can also read Mariam’s Facebook post here:

Featured Image: Facebook (Mariam Jaafar)