As retailers start to reopen after COVID-19, do this...

We've seen some baby steps towards what will become the New Normal in society in the last week; namely, some stores and businesses starting to reopen again after the Covid Curve has started to flatten if not decline to any great extent.

Here in Ontario, stores with street entrances will be allowed to open now provided they follow strict guidelines to protect both the public and their employees.  That means any store within a mall will have to wait for now.

What this means to you and me is we can access more locally and hopefully rely on the internet a little less.  But will we?

I have fears that will not necessarily be the case as people are either A.) still afraid to shop in traditional bricks & mortar shops or B.) simply have gotten used to the convenience of ordering online and having it ready for pickup or delivered right to your door.

The former concern may be reduced over time, although for the time being I understand completely people who feel that way.  Especially those with compromised immune systems or otherwise cannot easily access a traditional store for some reason.  This has become an increasingly scary time and fears are not necessarily unfounded when it comes to community transmission of the virus.

The latter point, that people are now accustomed to ordering online, presents us with a far greater problem.  And it is one I am afraid time will not erase.  If anything it could grow exponentially over the coming years.

Working as I do sorting parcels and such for mail delivery at the Canada Post depot here in St. Catharines early in the morning, I see first hand the effects of rampant online shopping.  Everything from golf clubs to gaming chairs to backup generators have come through the depot for delivery in recent months.

Most popular items to order online regularly still appear to be toilet paper, cat litter and oddly, wine.

I can understand perhaps the attraction of ordering wine online, as just yesterday afternoon while out on my weekly errands I passed the LCBO store in the plaza I was at in the north end and the liquor store had by far the longest lineup to enter.  But I'm not convinced this is the best course of action to take.

With the avalanche of orders for inane things coming in from China, I wonder what people are thinking when say, I see a single sponge being ordered online from China.  Don't laugh.  It happens with great regularity.

Yes it is convenient and yes, the selection is usually great.  But consider this:  if we continue to order online at our present pace we could very well face the realization it is the only way to acquire things, as most stores will have closed up shop.

I know, it is perhaps a little far-fetched at the moment, but look at the bankruptcies we're seeing at an alarming rate these days:  Neiman-Marcus, J.C. Penny and others in the States and Pier One Imports and many others in North America as a whole.

Shopping on Amazon can be a very rewarding experience if you're careful, but Amazon being the only retailer of choice for many people is simply not healthy, for a lot of reasons.  Eventually that will be all we have and I can't see that being for the better in the long run.

There is a fairly recent phenomenon called "show-rooming", where people will go into a traditional store to actually see an item and then go home and order it at a cheaper price online.  Sometimes from the online portal of the same retailer but not always.  You can only take advantage of that luxury for so long before the local store simply doesn't exist anymore.

Working in a CD store many years ago shortly after the dawn of the internet, I used to have people regularly come into the store trying to find a piece of music they heard on the radio.  We would do the legwork usually calling the radio station that played the piece (if indeed they knew the station) and get the details for the customer.  Often they were grateful and would then order the CD from us, but in later years we were increasingly frustrated by people who would use us as a library of sorts to search out the information and then take it and go home and order the CD online from somewhere else.

Eventually we wisely decided to take a different course of action and simply say we knew what they heard and say yes, we can get it for you, without actually telling them the details.  Not the best thing to do but it did cut down on the number of so-called "show-roomers".

The point I'm trying to make here is simple.  Local retailers count on us - you and me - to stay in business.  Today especially as they slowly start to reopen after being closed for the better part of two months or longer, they need our business more than ever.

I realize not everyone has been working steadily during this pandemic and for many of them shopping now is simply not in the cards when they still have monthly bills they have to somehow pay.  But for those of us who can, who do plan to shop in the near future, I can't stress enough just how important it is to shop local.

Your local shopkeepers depend on your - and my - business in order to survive.  If you are not comfortable entering the shop yet, that's fine.  Arrange for someone else to pick it up or even take advantage of curbside pickup or delivery options if at all possible.

Please consider this as we start to reopen.  Amazon may always be there but your local retailer may not always be, unless we make it worth their while to stay open.

Thanks for your time and have a great weekend!

May 23rd, 2020.