Covid 19 has had a severe impact on our industry and customers, which is likely to reverberate around the business for many years to come. However, we’ve stayed open throughout, initially closing the trade counter and relying on our website and telephone sales. In fact our fastest selling items in the early days of covid were masks, gloves and hand gel, with one mailshot leaving us having difficulty answering the telephone!
Our trade counter has been busier than ever since we re-opened a few weeks ago, indeed we are seeing more customers on a daily basis than ever before. As a result we’ve added a number of items to the sales area in the trade counter, items many trades will need, such as gloves, drills and consumables.
Thankfully things have started to stabilise, we have now got all our staff back in, the counter has opened again and customers are back again. The crisis has allowed us to take stock of a number of things we previously took for granted.
- We’ve had time to work through the stock room completely, removing slow or non selling items and tidying the shelves of split boxes and ensuring that we make it easy to find those elusive fixings.
- All sales on the counter are now through the computer.
- We’ve ensured that all our fast moving items are within the stock system.
- Whilst we continue to keep obsolete and slow moving fixings, we’ve made the systems and stockroom simpler, to ensure we can locate accurately.
- We have moved to card payment only (NO CASH) for one off sales on the trade counter.
- Trade counter sales have a minimum charge of £5 plus VAT. This has been in place for some months and is in line with most of our trade competitors.
So whilst things are “back to normal “ and much has changes, great service and prices remain. So come in and see us soon.
