moleculo
Footballguy
love it. I mean, it sucks that you have to take all these precautions and will be losing revenue, but I love that you have plans in place to deal with all of this. Yeah, it's going to be tough, for sure.Oh I think we can stay in business and survive—but before this pandemic—we were thriving. I’m almost certain that it will be a while before we can “thrive” again. Our showroom is 450 square feet and before the pandemic we had 3 people working at any given time—and our entire staff is 6 people. Our showroom is in the shape of a large rectangle—with two long rows of display cases running down each side. Effectively—there’s an alleyway down the middle of our shop where customers can check out our displays. If we want to practice proper social distancing standards (which is what we will want to do)—we can’t really have more than 2 customers in our shop at any given time. That is going to hurt us as we are typically a high volume shop.
Secondly—we have to look at protecting our business in regards to the employee side of things. We can’t really have 3 people working at the shop at any given time moving forward being that if one infected customer comes in and exposes the staff to the virus—half of our staff would be quarantined for a minimum of 2 weeks. Therefore—we’d have to drop to 2 employees a day—which means that every employee will be making less and working fewer hours.
Lastly—brick and mortar stores were fighting for margins even before the pandemic. Now we will have to have reduced customers and we will have to bear the burden of much higher expenses. We’ll have to supply employees gloves and masks. We’ll also have to have a supply of masks for customers as we’ll want them to be masked up as well. We’ll have to double or triple the amount of wipes, sanitizer, cleaning supples that we provide. We’ll have to do a thorough disinfecting/cleaning of the store several times a day and completely wipe down all counters after each customer. These types of expenses will eat up margins. Heck—I just purchased an industrial grade uv-c sanitation chamber out of my own pocket so that we can disinfect any watch, piece of jewelry and also sanitize our own tools and instruments to insure the safety of our customers and our employees. I also purchased 5 uv-c lamps out of my pocket so that we can sanitize areas of the shop before opening and after closing to aid in keeping us super sanitized. Essentially—we’ll have to somehow thrive on working with limited volume in regards to clients, and higher overhead—all in an environment that is risky at best. Seeing 40-60 customers a day when there is a virus out there that could force us to quarantine is scary in and of itself. I’m really hoping that they develop a treatment or vaccine soon.
I wonder what else you can expand into to help. Custom jewlery, estate sales and/or consignment, larger internet presence, etc. I'm sure you have thought of all of this much more than I have.
I wish you luck!