Hello my bookstore family,
I feel like it’s my duty as a responsible shop owner, as a responsible employer, and as a responsible friend to all of you to let you know that one of our beloved employees went to get a rapid test today for COVID and it’s come back positive. We’ve been following protocols and wearing masks, so I’m hopeful (of course I’m hopeful!) that this helped mitigate risk to any of you who shopped with us recently, but I would be remiss in not alerting you.
I was able to get an appointment in the morning to be tested, but regardless, I’ve made the difficult decision to close the store to in-store browsing for at least a week but my gut tells me to just close for the rest of the month (which is only two weeks) due to the increasing spikes. I was already toying with that last week, but settled on just cancelling our participation in artwalk Friday night.
I’m not going to lie, this will affect my business. Of course it will. But, BUT, BUT I would much rather err on the side of caution and do the right thing for the community. The store will weather through this. We weathered through April, which was the worst month–we only made a quarter of what we normally would have made. By July we’d crept back up to 50% of normal and this Fall we’ve been just on par with last year at this time. If we can make it through April, we can do it again.
I’ll still be here to do contactless delivery and curbside pickup and will be wearing gloves when I pull books, but if you’d rather not take a chance, I totally understand. If you still want to support my store, I can ship most books to you by having them go to your home straight from my distributor–how that works is you order a book for shipping and I log into my distributor’s website and instead of having the book delivered here, I select Home Delivery and it just goes straight from the warehouse in Tennessee to you. If you want to save the step of ordering from me, you can just go to our Bookshop.org page and they’ll fulfill the order and ship it to you (and we’d still get a cut).
This is such an uncertain time and my heart goes out to all of you. I’m extremely encouraged, however, by the results I’m hearing about the Pfizer vaccine.
Together we can get through this. Thank you for your continued support. Stay safe. Stay healthy.
Love,
Angela Trigg
Owner, The Haunted Book Shop