A Shifting Work Place

It's crazy how fast this virus is changing how our store is running. 

Like. On Thursday when I left I'd just gotten word that we were canceling our dog training classes, shortening our grooming hours so that the salon would close two hours earlier, and that we wouldn't be allowing customers to hold pets unless they were planning to buy them today. 

And then yesterday I got word that instead of shortening our grooming hours....the company has decided to close down the grooming department for at least two weeks, if not longer for the time being.

Which honestly makes sense. It's hard to keep social distancing in the grooming salon and harder still to keep surfaces all nice and clean with all the dogs and fur flying about.

They also announced yesterday that we were shortening our store hours now. Closing two hours earlier. 

And today we were informed that on Monday the company is going to start a curbside pickup service. So that customers won't need to come into the store to buy anything they can just order online and we'll bring it out to their car. 

It's crazy how fast things are altering. Honestly I won't be surprised if we have more changes happen before I get back to work on Monday, but we'll see. 

In any case.

Grooming.

I was wondering what was going to happen to all those people. Because like...grooming/bathing is what they do for a living. To be without their jobs for like 2 weeks...isn't a good thing when you still have bills to pay and such.
So I was wondering if they would be just without work? Or if some people would take vacation/sick time to still earn money during the time frame.

But I got the answer to what most of them are going to be doing.

My manager is bringing them into the Core of the store.

Which it's kinda crazy to figure out how to schedule 10 extra bodies in the store that you usually never have available in the store as the groomers/bathers tend to stay in their salon and don't interact much or work much in the main store unless they're cross trained.
-As we do have a couple of bathers working part time in the store and part time in the salon.

But yah.
The next couple of weeks are going to be weird because I'll be interacting more with my grooming coworkers than I ever have as really I only see them in passing.

But I am grateful that the manager is willing to work with them and try and make sure that they earn a paycheck during the next couple of weeks by scheduling them to work....

Hopefully we can find things for them to help us with....as I'm hoping not many customers will be coming into the store....we'll see though.

Until you next see these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi