Slowly, slowly - retail re-opens

Jeff Green | May 20, 2020

While the Province of Ontario, and the premier himself, prepared the public for a stage re-opening of the Ontario economy back in April, the specific announcements about which businesses can re-open, and when, has been a closely guarded secret.

Most of the businesses in Frontenac County only learned they were to re-open, the same way everyone else did, when it was announced by the premier last Thursday (May 14).

“I was a bit surprised that we were clear to open on Saturday, to be honest, when we did not hear until Thursday, I thought it would be after the long weekend, but we are ready,” said Mike Dillon, the Manager of Rivendell Golf Course in Verona, when contacted last Friday morning.

Dillon added that the course was booked solid for the Saturday opening, and he expected the long weekend to remain busy, as long as the weather held.

Golf courses were given a heads up when they were cleared to get ready, a couple of weeks earlier, allowing Rivendell to put together a plan for operating the club, while keeping the staff and golfers safe.

There were not guidelines from the province to help develop those protocols, but golf course associations in Canada and the United States have been sharing best practices between them, so Dillon was confident that Rivendell’s plan was a sound one.

Over in Cloyne, at Hunter’s Creek, co-owner Cynthia Kennedy was similarly surprised, but ready as well, having spent all spring getting the course ready and thinking her way through how to open safely.

“We are all systems go,” she said, “the course is in fine shape and we even have our men's league set to start next week, and the women’s league may start next week, or the week after,” she said last Friday.

A lot of the activities at Hunter’s Creek, including horseshoes and frisbee golf, are similar to golf in that they lend themselves to social distancing requirements, but Kennedy said they are hindered in the early season by black flies.

Like Rivendell, Hunter’s Creek is serving takeout meals only, in compliance with the provincial order shutting down restaurant dining rooms.

Golf courses are fortunate, as compared to some other businesses, in being able to re-open, and both Kennedy and Dillon said they feel they did not lose much in the way of traffic by not opening May 1st as normal, because early May is not their peak season in any year and the weather was unseasonably cool this year.

“We will be hit with the loss of the larger charity tournaments,” said Kennedy, noting that the Pine Meadow Classic in late June was one of the first events to be cancelled, back in late March. “Those tournaments are important to our bottom line. We may be able to hold some smaller, family tournaments, but the larger ones won’t be able to go ahead and that revenue is just gone.”

Food and beverage sales will also take a hit.

Retail stores are taking a go-slow approach in the face of the re-opening announcement.

Although Nicole Van Camp could have opened her store, Nicole’s Gifts in Verona, as early as Tuesday morning (May 19), she decided to take a more cautious approach.

“I have told customers that we are open by appointment this week, and if I am in the store and there are no other customers inside, I will welcome them in, but I won’t have regular store hours until next week,” she said, when contacted at the store on Tuesday morning.

When the pandemic hit, Van Camp closed her store even before she was forced to do so, after she realised what the implications of the COVID-19 virus were.

“I did not feel that a gift store was the kind of business that needed to stay open,” she said at the time. Within a week, non-essential businesses were closed across the province. Nicole’s Gifts has been operating through online ordering since then.

“This week I am working on disinfection. I didn’t see the point in doing it while I was shut down because I knew I would have to do it again before I opened the doors,” she said this week.

She will have everything in place by next week, and is hoping that the infection rate in the province remains manageable, and very low in our region, which has been spared the worst of the outbreak thus far.

Just down the road from Nicole’s Gifts, Revell Ford has been navigating its way through COVID-19 as well.

As one of the largest employers in Frontenac County, with a full service and body shop as well as a new and used car dealership, Revell’s has 50 full or part-time employees.

They shut down their service centre on March 25.

“Customers were coming back from the South and coming in to get their cars serviced as soon as they arrived, and this made some of our own people pretty nervous. With everything that was going on, we decided the best thing to do was to close down entirely. Our service manager was available by cell phone, and for our customers who were in a real bind, he made sure their vehicles were still serviced, but for the most part we were shut down,” said Larry Revell, co-owner and manager.

They kept on doing online sales, but the showroom was shut down by provincial order. On April 14, the service centre re-opened, with social distancing measures in place, plexiglass in front of the service desk and chairs set 15 feet apart in the drive-through waiting area. On May 5, call ahead appointments for car sales were available, and as of this week the showroom is open.

But things are not getting back to a pre-COVID normal by any means.

“When we service a vehicle, we disinfect before we start and then disinfect again when the service is complete. Same thing for test drives. We have had a lot of help from OMVIC (the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council) and a health and safety group in Kingston, that they are associated with, to help us put in all of the measures we needed to have in place in order to open our doors.”

Those measures include constant cleaning, PPE, plexiglass at every sales desk and tracking everyone who comes into the building. That way if anyone who has visited the dealership develops COVID-19, it will be easy for Public Health to trace contacts.

“There is a lot to this, certainly more than we knew when we started out. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen, but we will get through it. Our business has been through a lot over the years,” he said.

Revell Ford was founded during the Great Depression, in 1936.