‘Trust retailers on reopening’

COUNTING THE COST OF COVID:

Non essential retailers have spent almost as much time shut as open over the last year. The Westmeath Examiner talked to one local retailer, who says that the government needs to put its faith in retailers and to re-open the entire sector sooner rather than later.

The last 12 months have been challenging for the entire retail sector but Chris Brennan is grateful that Mullingar Furniture Wholesale has up to now managed to escape the worst of the financial fallout from repeated lockdowns.

The Mullingar Business Park-based furniture store, like every other non-essential retailer, was forced to close for the best part of three months last spring during the first lockdown of the pandemic. When things reopened in the summer, the store experienced an unexpected but welcomed spike in sales.

“The reaction when we reopened at the end of May was phenomenal. We didn’t really end up being down anything, despite being closed 12 weeks. The impact was hard at the start [of the first lockdown] and all of us were off, like most people, but when we reopened, the best way to put is that the floodgates opened.

“The pent up frustration that people had from sitting at home looking at their four walls meant that they wanted to change furniture and beds. We would have seen a benefit from the first lockdown. From then until Christmas we were busier than we have ever been and we have been here for 10 years. We would never had a run of business like after the initial lockdown.”

With little to spend their money on throughout 2020, those lucky enough to hold on to their jobs saw their savings swell and unsurprisingly many chose to revamp their homes.

“A family holiday is going to be five or six thousand euro if you are going away for a couple of weeks with a few kids. It’s money that people hadn’t spent. Talking to people when they came in, all they had been spending money on for 14 or 15 weeks was groceries. Their food bills went up but everything else went down.”

Surplus money

“We definitely felt that there was a lot of surplus money around and that fed into people sitting at home for three or four months and when things opened up, they went hell for leather. We made up the three or four months we lost in the final six months of the year. I know it is probably one of the better stories out there.”

Like every other non-essential retailer, Mullingar Furniture Wholesale has been closed to public since early January when the country returned to Level 5 restrictions.

Members of the public can still order goods and have them delivered, but Chris says that when it comes to furniture, many people understandably want to sit on an armchair or lie on a mattress before shelling out money for it.

After last year’s post-lockdown bounce, he is hoping that lightning will strike twice when non-essential is allowed to reopen. February and March are generally the quietest months in terms of sales, so the timing of the lockdown wasn’t the worst, but the longer it goes on, the more uncertain the future looks.

“We obviously have zero footfall at the moment, this one will probably hit us more than the previous one. We are still hoping for some sort of bounce but we are only basing that on the end of the lockdown last year. That may not come to fruition this time... We will be doing very well if we can crawl back three months of lost business in the next seven or eight months.”

Chris believes that it might be May before the store will open. While fully aware of the threat that Covid-19 still poses, he believes the powers that be need to reopen the non-essential retail sector sooner rather than later. Retailers have invested significant sums in making their stores safe for customers and the decision makers should recognise that.

“We have a very safe environment here. We have a 25,000 sq ft building. We could operate an appointment system just to get things going with only two sets of customers at any one time.

“From speaking to other businesses in town, the crushing thing for a lot of them is that this time around we are ready for it [reopening]. We have the sanitation stations, we have the screens at our counters. Everyone is more aware. It is rare that someone doesn’t have a mask on and generally it is due to them having an underlying condition.

“This time, we are far more set up for it. We feel like we could have worked through this one because of what we learned in the first one. We could have done it extremely safely, but we were never given the chance.

“That is probably the most frustrating part. We definitely felt that we got to a position where we could have soldiered through it. We did inquire whether we could hold private viewings by appointment but the guards said that it doesn’t fall under the remit of essential retail.”

As the vaccine is rolled out and more and more of the most vulnerable members of the community are vaccinated, Chris hopes that the government put their faith in the retail sector and other parts of the economy and allows to reopen.

“All of these businesses implemented procedures around nine months ago when we were getting ready to open up after the first lockdown. We opened and it became a safe environment. We hope that they will respect business people and shop owners and realise that these people have made a huge sacrifice but also that they took the initiative and made their businesses so safe.

“There really is no reason we can’t open again in a safe manner this time around. The government should put trust back into the retailers who have gone above and beyond to set up a safe environment for people to come into.”