Interview: Indoor retail shopping resumes at limited capacity
“From our perspective, retail is one of the safest industries, it’s one of the safest places to go. Retailers up and down the state have invested millions of dollars in safety precautions.
Retailers were on the cutting edge of implementing the mandate on face coverings even before Governor Newsom mandated it across the state. We take safety very seriously and we look forward to having our consumers coming in and seeing all of the safety precautions we are taking.
Retail is a huge economic driver to the state and local economies, we are a job creator and we really want to see our consumers coming back into the stores.
COVID-19 is having an impact- Nordstroms, JC Pennys, some of the iconic brands, are closing their stores and shrinking their footprints, which is devastating. But, more importantly, we are starting to see, particularly our smaller and independent retailers up and down the state- these are folks with a passion to open a store in their community- they are really feeling the impacts of COVID-19, of the economic situation that we are in, so we are trying to do everything we can to really encourage folks to consider these retailers as well. They don’t necessarily have a huge imprint online, they don’t necessarily have the ability to do the online shopping, so we want to see the industry as a whole really thrive in CA and it’s going to be up to us, Californians, to really make that decision to take a chance and come into our establishments.
CRA is doing our Safe Shopping For ALL campaign- we are launching a new logo, a new safe shopping bear, that you will see across the state. We have some exciting plans that will be unveiled over the next couple of months as we enter the holiday season. We want people to know that we need you to come in and wear your face covering. We need you to be respectful of our employees and our sales associates because we really want to make the shopping experience as safe as possible so that we can have people enter our stores and have a great shopping experience.
Retail is taking this seriously. We are leading all industries when it comes to safe shopping. “
