Can you help us?
by Kenna Eaton, GM
Recently someone told me that “my mask protects you and your mask protects me” –made sense to me. To many of us, being safe is just plain sensible right now. the Co-op has made the difficult decision to require all customers, as well as staff to mask up while in our store.
As of May 5th, all our staff began wearing masks—and now, beginning Thursday May 14th we ask you to join us by wearing a mask to help us protect and care for each other and the greater community. If you don’t have a mask, you can use a scarf or a bandana. And right now, with deep appreciation for those who sew and donate their work, you can often find FREE handmade masks made by local volunteers in our front entry. Thank you for complying and helping limit the spread of the corona virus in our community.
In addition, please help us limit the number of people in the store at any one time—shop weekly, not daily… or you can use our curbside pickup program. ‘Coop2Go’ is a great new way to shop our store and is freshly available on our website. Currently we are using a fairly simple shopping list style; you tell us what you want, we do the shopping and you come to the store just to pick it up. This week we’re anticipating adding a mobile register that will allow you to pay outside, rather than coming inside the store or giving us your credit card number over the phone. This should also work for our EBT/SNAP customers and allow them to enter their own PIN code at the time of payment. And coming in a few weeks will be a much more robust version of an online shopping platform, with all the bells and whistles of the big stores including photos of most of our inventory and information about sizes and prices. This has been a HUGE investment of staff time and resources for us, but we think it will be worth it in the long run. We sure hope you do too!
Next, please limit the number of people who shop with you. Leave your family and friends at home and bring them back some treats! If we get too many shoppers in the store, we will have to begin limiting access to a small group of customers at any one time. Frankly this move will cost us even more in increased labor and decreased sales, so we’d rather not take that step if we don’t need to, but we are preparing just in case.
Finally, my deep appreciation to all of you—for supporting & for caring about us. Thanks for all your positive comments and messages of gratitude. And a huge shout out to our staff who are working hard to keep those smiles as big and as bright as ever, behind their masks. And last, but not least, my best advice—wash your hands and give everyone some space!
