‘Ready to move on’: Local retailers, government officials welcome stay at home order adjustment
Gov. Kay Ivey announced Tuesday morning that the state’s stay at home order would end this week, and a looser safer at home order will be taking effect, allowing for the reopening of retail stores across the state.
In the Warehouse District, Monograms Plus is gearing up to welcome customers back inside.
“I’m definitely excited to see people again; excited to have people come in the store and shop, all of it,” said store owner Lynsey Todd.
Monograms Plus has been closed to the public, but the store has still been selling items on Facebook and Instagram and by text, she said.
Todd said she received the federal Paycheck Protection Program loan to help pay employees for the duration of the retail restrictions, and while employees had to be laid off for a couple of weeks before she got the loan, the store’s workers have been back at work for the last three weeks after receiving the money.
“I wanted to make sure my employees were taken care of,” she said.
Ivey’s new order limits stores to 50 percent of their maximum occupancy, but Todd said Monograms Plus will be adopting stricter limits when the store reopens.
“We’re actually doing less than that,” she said. “Our maximum occupancy is about 120-something people, so we don’t feel comfortable having 60 people in so we’re probably going to limit it to about 10.”
She said the store will only have one entrance open so they can keep up with who is going in and out, and they will have plenty of hand sanitizer on hand for customers and employees.
With the current order ending at 5 p.m. Thursday, some stores in the Warehouse District will immediately be ready and waiting to welcome customers back inside, Todd said.
She said stores will open at 5:01 p.m. and remain open until 8 p.m. to let local residents do some of the shopping that they have missed out on over the last month.
A Touch of German owner Judith Caples, who is also the president of the Downtown Merchants Association, said she is happy to see stores beginning to reopen after several weeks of closures.
“Ours is going to probably be a whole lot slower in people coming back, but I am glad that things are starting to move,” she said.
Caples said she is also glad to see the state move towards a gradual reopening of its stores.
“I like the way it’s being done in phases, to see what happens, how people are responding and people being sick,” she said.
When the store opens back up, it will be open on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
The new order won’t mean many new changes to how municipalities have been operating over the last two months, but local leaders said they were glad that some of the area’s small businesses are able to open back up.
Cullman Mayor Woody Jacobs said he was happy to see the governor’s announcement, and the reopening should bring some relief to small businesses that have been hit hard by the COVID-19 closures.
“I was thrilled,” he said. “I’m extremely glad for our stores to be able to open back up.”
Cullman passed its own orders earlier this month restricting the essential stores to no more than 40 percent of their maximum fire capacity, and most of the stores that have remained open have actually kept the number of customers inside lower than that, but the state’s orders will supersede the city’s orders, Jacobs said.
Hanceville Mayor Kenneth Nail said the Safer at Home order won’t change many things that the city has already been doing, but it is time to take a long-term look at how people can return to work while still taking the proper precautions to stay safe during the pandemic.
This outbreak could go on for many months, and continued closures could spiral national economies into a worldwide depression, so something has to be done to let people stay safe and go back to work, he said.
“Whatever it means, and whatever it might involve, we may have to look at carving out a new normal that opens things up more; that lets people work and go about their lives,” he said. “We don’t know if there’s gonna be a second wave; a third wave of this in the months and years ahead. And we can’t survive two or three years here of folks not working.”
Cullman County Commission Chairman Kenneth Walker said he will be joining an ACCA [Association of County Commission of Alabama] webinar on Wednesday, and that should let the commission’s members know a little more about any details that may apply to county commissions.
“If there are any changes we need to make, we probably would make a decision and act on it soon after that,” he said.
Jacobs said he appreciates everyone’s patience during the COVID-19 closures that have affected everyone in the area, and local leaders are looking forward to the day when the restrictions are no longer needed.
“We’re like everybody else,” he said. “We’re ready to put this behind us and move on.”