Covid 19 news update
World Turning
Ours is a very social business. Most days, Signals resembles a small (free) cafe, certainly not a shop. There is a lot of interaction with our customers, many of whom have become good friends. Visitors who have come a distance are quite often given food too. With our decent little kitchen and Nick’s excellent coffee beans, it’s all very homely.
We’ve built our own world and all of us enjoy working in it Demonstrations are mainly held in our domestically dimensioned sitting rooms and the curiously empathetic aspect of engaging with customers and hearing music virtually through their ears is one of the joys of our business.
March is the last month of what has been a remarkable year for us, with business levels exceeding anything we’ve seen before. Yet, here we are looking bleakly at a world that has changed beyond recognition in a rather less positive way.
From our own perspective, in the midst of this, we have some significant orders still to arrive with us and these will need to be installed to their new owners as soon as possible. Our customers have shown immense trust in buying these items from us and now we need to make every effort to ensure that we deliver goods, not viruses.
None of us are particularly young and we all have elderly parents. Of the four of us, only Mick has parents who are able to self isolate on their own terms. All the others need help from their offsprings. That’s us.
Two recent conversations have started to crystallise matters:
One was with a customer who has already lost his father to Covid 19. Suddenly, this is so much more tangible.
The second was with my daughter who is an OT in the NHS. She is, with many others, being drafted into the Covid 19 arrangements. She pleaded with us to take the social distancing instructions even more seriously.
As is already signposted on our web site, we feel that we need to make urgent changes.
We will continue to be at work and will respond to telephone and email communications. The place needs to be manned to receive and, perhaps, despatch deliveries.
For now, we are not doing any face to face demonstrations. We are happy to sell products via mail order (sale or return is a possibility). Several of the manufacturers are now willing ship directly to end users on our behalf, reducing shipping damage risk and speeding the process up. Normal rules are being set aside for these very unusual circumstances.
Collections from reception here will be fine too. We love dressing up in these hazmat suits 🙂 Any loan items sent out will be disinfected at both ends of the process.
To make life more interesting, and maybe bring some of the normal engagement, we will attempt to start playing with various pieces of audio kit and posting this to our blog.
With our web site due some maintenance soon, we might have use Facebook or some other platform for some of this.
I hope we can all look forward to normality returning sooner rather than later, that you will continue to deal with us and, more to the point, forgive my customarily verbose spiel.Please, all, stay safe, even if it’s boring. We hope we will need you in the future!
Andy, Mick, Rhea and Alastair at Signals
tel 01394 672464 + 672465