North Vancouver toy shop proactively moves business online to prevent COVID spread
Posted January 6, 2022 4:01 pm.
Last Updated January 6, 2022 7:02 pm.
The owner of a toy store in North Vancouver isn’t taking any chances when it comes to the COVID-19 Omicron variant. She’s temporarily closing the doors to in-person shopping as a precaution.
Donna Grocott with BC Playthings says she’s thinking of it like a snow week — or several — and putting safety first, as her customers are made up of a lot of young kids who aren’t very good at physically distancing.
And when it comes to her staff, they’re made up of a lot of older teens.
“It’s just too easy for them to slowly come together, as teenagers do … it’s going through our neighbourhood quite fast,” she said.
Grocott adds she doesn’t want to see her store become the cause of transmission, especially with some staff going back to university soon.
“They are getting on planes and if they caught something from my store and took it with them, I’d feel terrible.”
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She adds there’s a personal element to her decision, as well.
“I live in a community where I hired the kids that came in as customers. So I know these families really, really well,” she explained.
“I know the grandparents. I know the moms, the little kids. I think is really important right now to let everybody know that this is maybe not the time to just walk down to some place that’s convenient so that you can entertain the kids. Rather, it’s more of a time that we just keep everybody safe.”
Grocott is hopeful she will be comfortable returning to business as usual within a few weeks.
At the end of the day, she says, they’re just toys.
“This as my mantra … We’re just a toy store. These are not life products — I’m a terrible business person for saying that,” she laughed. “But there’s limits to what we should be doing right now.”
So, she’s okay with sticking to online orders and curbside pickup for now.
“We have a goofy red chair … We decorate it up a little bit and jazz it up. People knock on the door, we find out their name and we go grab their order, ask them to step away, we open the door, and put it on the chair. It’s quite efficient.”
On Tuesday, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry told businesses to ensure they’re following COVID safety plans and to have contingency plans.
“We need to anticipate that as many as a third of your workforce at any one time may become ill with COVID-19 and they may not be able to come to work, and we need to adapt … So we can operate at these reduced numbers.”
According to Henry, about 80 per cent of new COVID-19 cases in B.C. are the highly-contagious Omicron variant, overtaking the Delta variant case count.
With files from Nikitha Martins
