When I was in Hawkers Department, I was involved in the controlling of illegal hawkers in Singapore. Some of these illegal hawkers were very enterprising, they set-up their stalls in front of most shop houses, along the 5-footways.
They discreetly, pay the shopkeepers “rent” for using the space, to setup their stalls. Most of such stalls, would sell fresh fruits. During Hawkers Inspectors’ rounds, these illegal operators claim the stalls belong to the shopkeepers. The shop keepers then come and claim them as theirs. Therefore, the illegal hawkers became “part shopkeepers”, we were completely helpless in taking any action against them.
It was then I decided to combine forces with officers from “Weights and Measures Department” (W&MD). Hence, during our illegal hawkers’ operations we a “combined raid”. We then inspected the “part shopkeepers” and got the W&MD officers to check-out the accuracy of the weighing machines. Most of the machines were found to be tampered-with.
So, we called the shopkeeper and told him/her “his weighing scale was tampered with, the W&MD officers need his particulars”, as an offence had been committed.
On hearing this usually the shopkeeper comes clean, and say that the stall is not his/her and returns the “rent money” to the illegal hawkers. So now we can book the hawker for illegal hawking and also the W&MD officers will book the hawker, for tampering with the weights. This “two prong-attack” assisted in controlling such illegal hawkers then, especially along the very crowded shops in Singapore.
This phenomenon also started with increasing complaints from those patronising the illegal hawkers, they lamented that they were cheated by the illegal hawkers. For example, one customer who bought 1kg of fruits found that it was only 0.85kg when it was weighed at home. The illegal hawkers had tampered with the weighing scales, thus cheating their innocent customers. The customers were looking for “cheap and good fruits” but ended up getting cheated and most of the time given fruits whose shelf-life was about to expire or not very fresh fruits.
We requested the public not to patronise the illegal hawkers, because of their cheating ways. Many of the cheated were contacted and told of our enforcement action, they were very happy that they got justice.
