Dear Fiesta Community,
What’s the latest from inside your place?
For our part, we have 4 things to share:
- Delivery: We’re officially taking delivery orders from customers in the neighbourhood who identify as members of a vulnerable population.
- Our latest tactics to protect you and our staff
- What you can do to help us protect the public and our team
1. Delivery
Online ordering and delivery is currently for people who:
- Are over 70
- Have a disability
- Are Immunocompromised
- Are expecting mothers
Delivery Area
This community effort is available within an approximate 2km radius of our store.
Delivery terms include:
- Minimum 20 items. All orders must contain at least twenty items. Please check your lists/recipes twice–we can’t come back later in the day with three missing ingredients.
- The delivery is $15 (Sorry! – We’ve had to hire staff to shop, pack and deliver)
- Delivery is an emergency measure. If you’re a member of a vulnerable population but have other resources (e.g. friends who can shop for you), please use them so we can prioritize those most at risk.
Find process details and the order form on the delivery page!
2. In-store tactics.
Along with the measures listed in our previous Covid 19 posts, we’ve:
- Had to significantly minimize the number of people entering the store.
- Started removing notices. We’ve had so many notices about the behaviour we need people to respect (social distancing) that visitors became blind to them. Hopefully, a reduction overall will help the ones that remain stand out.
- Have security (working on their charm tactics) at the front door, observing entrants for flue symptoms and asking people whether they’ve been on a flight or airport in the last 14 days.
- Have security and managers roaming the store and gently reminding inadvertent clusters to distance
- Suspended the Flyer until further notice. Brands aren’t offering promos at the moment so there are no savings for us to pass on. But while we’re not offering discounts, we’re also not changing our prices to capitalize on the situation. If you liked our pre-pandemic prices, you’ll still like ’em. If you didn’t, you’re still not comparing apples to apples😜.
3. What you can do.
Please minimize the number of people you bring from your household where possible.
This is a major pain point for us. We’re Italian. Procuring food together is more than a cultural tradition. It’s in our DNA. Nevertheless, for the next while, shopping should be as solitary an act as it can be.
Please consolidate your shops
We know you love coming to the store. Isolation is hard. You suddenly have free time. Shopping is an important/useful and anxiety-reducing distraction. Living near a grocery store is one of the things that make putting up with cost of city living worthwhile. Smaller, regular shops make it easier to reduce food waste. Etc.
All of this is true. And we can’t wait to help you get back to your food shopping values and practices. You can’t imagine how badly we want things to go back to normal.
Until they do, please cut down your shop to once per week. Two at most. We’re going to start sharing menu ideas and shopping recommendations to help you practice planning and prepping for longer visits between shops.
Have patience
Early in the pandemic, we weathered a run on the shelves. Luckily we had plenty of stock, supply was fine, and we had the energy to double down on filling the shelves.
Then we learned about social distancing, crowds came in waves, and we started crowd management measures.
Now we’re focused on helping people maintain social distance inside the store. This is creating a queue outside. A safely social distanced queue that wraps around the corner. Luckily, we’re looking at pleasant weather these days. If it rains, we’ll see if we can add cover from the Garden centre.
The good news is that right now we’re fully stocked. We’re at the mercy of suppliers, who in turn are trying to balance their distribution, so we can’t make any more promises than we would on a non-pandemic day. But as of today, we’re okay. If we can see that we’ll be receiving less of a common item, we’ll reduce the number people are allowed to buy in a single visit.
Now that most of us have time on our hands, all we need to learn is some patience, discipline, and a few new food habits, and the strain will be reduced for everyone. Yay!