Uum, slicing a chicken for a buyer. (JG Photo/Lisa Siregar)
Everyone is used to Jakarta’s legions of cart vendors, warungs and roadside restos making mealtimes easy and quick. After all, in such a fast-paced city, preparing family meals often poses a challenge.
But it is harder on a different scale altogether for the small-scale mobile entrepreneurs who eke out a meager living making things easier for the rest of us. The pedagang keliling , or mobile vendors, ply the roads of housing complexes selling basic food items such as vegetables, spices and chicken. Some days they they turn a tiny profit, on others they lose money. Who would choose to do it?
Sumarni, 31, and Uum, 55, quit their jobs years ago to become mobile vendors.
At 7 a.m., Sumarni rides her red bicycle, with two plastic-layered baskets on the back holding all her wares. She sells rice cakes in banana leaves, donuts with thick sugar icing, rolled omelettes, fried tofu and glutinous cakes for Rp 500 (5 cents) each.
“I make these all by myself,” Sumarni said, to explain how her food could be so cheap. She has been a mobile vendor for eight years after quitting her job at a garment factory soon after she had her second son. “I want to watch my sons grow up, and I can’t do that if I have to work full-time at the factory,” she said.
Sumarni lives in Pondok Kelapa, East Jakarta, about 15 minutes away by bicycle from Bintara — the neighborhood which borders East Jakarta and Bekasi — where she sells her food. Her buyers are mostly housewives looking for a quick breakfast fix for their families.
For Uum, 55, working as a mobile vendor is hard, but easier than her previous job as a laundry woman. “I used to go to five houses every day and do their wash,” Uum said. “I worked from 3 p.m. to midnight.”
She jumped at the chance when someone in her neighborhood offered to give her a loan to start a business. Uum decided to sell chickens. With working capital of Rp 500,000 a day, she is able to buy and sell about 30 chickens. She sources them from the traditional market or from her neighborhood in Lampiri, Bekasi.
“I slice my own chicken. I fear that they use borax [at the market],” she said, referring to a common preservative.
According to University of Indonesia sociologist JF Warrouw, mobile vendors have been around since the Dutch colonial times.
“The fact that they still exist right now shows that all this time, our government has no welfare scheme at the grassroots level,” he said.
Warrouw said that in the urban life scenario, mobile vendors are classified under a market’s informal sector and are part of the support system for the lower classes.
He added that the lower classes normally live in survival mode, while those from the middle or upper classes shop for their needs on a weekly or monthly basis. Mobile vendors go around neighborhoods every day to make it easy for households to prepare their meals.
Bambang Ismawan, a small and medium enterprises expert, as quoted in the Journal of the Economy of People in 2002, states that the nation’s economic structure is unbalanced. Less than 1 percent of businessmen are able to earn special rights to access most of the resources and thus dominate market and economic growth.
But according to Bambang, this structure is a blessing in disguise for people who work in informal sectors, because despite being marginalized, they are better able to survive.
Bambang also mentions in his article that a study by the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) shows that about 36 million Indonesians work in the small and medium enterprises sector.
Sumarni has two sons, ages 10 and 8. She wakes up at 5 a.m. to pray, clean the house and prepare her food baskets before she leaves. Her 10-year-old boy stays at home to watch his younger brother. They leave for school at noon when she returns from selling her goods.
For Sumarni, being at home does not mean rest. She still needs to cook for her family and do the laundry, while keeping an eye out for her home-based shop.
Occasionally, she goes to a traditional market to buy ingredients she needs to prepare the food she sells.
As the sun goes down, Sumarni starts cooking. She washes the rice, cuts the vegetables, steams the rice cakes and makes the dough to be fried the next morning. “I cook from 6 p.m. until probably midnight,” she said.
In making rice cakes, she always makes sure that the rice is properly washed so that it won’t go bad at noon the next day. She said she can’t go to sleep before she finishes preparing everything.
“If washed properly, rice cakes should be good until the afternoon or at night,” she said.
Sumarni used to walk around the neighborhood before she decided to get a bicycle. Aside from her daily neighborhood rounds and home-based store, she also sells her wares at a stall near an angkot (public transport terminal).
“I make my cakes bigger and sell those at Rp 800. If the stall owner sells them at Rp 1,000, she can take an extra Rp 200,” Sumarni said.
Other than fried snacks, donuts and rice cakes, she also sells yellow rice and coconut rice for Rp 1,500.
“Going around selling cakes on a bicycle is healthy,” Sumarni said, adding that it gives her the chance to exercise while working.
She added that she was previously overweight and used to take traditional slimming drinks that caused illnesses like dizziness, clammy hands and shortness of breath.
Like Sumarni, Uum also uses a bicycle, given by a previous employer, to sell chicken. While she acknowledges she’s not good at math — something she blames on not getting a proper education when she was younger — she makes up for it with her loud voice when she goes out to sell.
She said that her math skills have somewhat improved over the years. “Now, I am better at counting change,” she said, laughing.
Zainal, one of Uum’s regular customers, said that people often try to trick her.
“Before, she did not know how to count change at all. We needed to do it for her,” Zainal said. “Sometimes, I round up my bill and give her the change.”
Uum has five children. Two of them are married, another works out of town and two more stay at home.
She starts selling chicken at 6 a.m. every day. She wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to prepare for another day on the streets.
“I’ve been selling chicken for 20 years. The price was only Rp 3,000 for a whole chicken back then,” Uum said. Right now, she buys a whole chicken for Rp 18,000 and sells them for Rp 21,000.
She is able to sell out her supply every day. However, she loses money very often because she can’t keep track of it. “Once when I was going around, I lost Rp 300,000 because there was apparently a hole in my pocket,” Uum said.
“My neighbors are used to this. One of them is kind enough to give me some money [when I lose it].”
“Boss told me to be careful next time,” Uum said in her thick Betawi accent, referring to her kind neighbor. “She said I should take care of myself because I often lose money.
“I don’t know how long I am going to do this. I am old, I will be going home to the soil soon,” she said with a laugh.
When she was talking, a cat clambered up her bicycle and stole a piece of chicken.
Uum immediately cut the interview short to chase after the thief. The feline got away by climbing up a tree and hiding on the rooftop.
She laughed at herself for forgetting to secure her baskets.
“I lost money, and now I lost my chicken too!”
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