11th May 2020
Hello
I hope you're all keeping well and healthy.
I wanted to write to let you all be the first to know that we are very tentatively going to open the shop this coming Saturday, 16th May.
We have been going round in circles with different methods we could use to get up and running again - what is the safest for us, what is safest for our customers, what is best for our children and what is best for the business. Being a food business we could have stayed open during lockdown, but we made the decision that we did not want to encourage people to leave their homes unless it was essential. Now that Boris has suggested that we can start to gradually think about returning to work we feel we can now consider having the doors of MMB open again and increasing these occasions gradually so that by the end of the furlough period we will hopefully be stable enough to go it alone without any government support, or maybe even sooner.
But we want to do this carefully and slowly. We want to test the water, test demand, test social distancing and see if we can make it work having the physical shop open rather than having to stick to deliveries (which require an awful lot more time in the car and administratively). And we want to be back in our shop. We miss it!
So this Saturday we will be open from 11am with a limited number of Walden White loaves only to be sold over the door threshold (as per our final week of sales before we closed back in March). It'll just be Jeff on his tod as one of us needs to stay at home with our girls. Like so many others, we have no childcare for the foreseeable. I will be very envious and wishing I could be there to see some of you from a distance, but needs must. We have no idea how quickly or slowly the loaves will sell but it'll be first come, first served and we will close when we've sold out. Whatever time that may be.
We are confident those hoping to come for bread will adhere to the social distancing we have all become so accustomed to if a queue were to form. If we feel the safety of our customers, or staff, is compromised in any way we will reconsider options for future openings (e.g. pre orders and set collection times) but we want to avoid these if possible as it will make things a lot more complicated for us at this end, which is not helpful when still keeping up with home schooling demands. It would also delay being able to get a greater offering on the shelves for you as we move forward. So please, do your best to not get carried away if and when you see familiar faces in the queue and let's try and make this work for everyone.
We are keen to extend our offering moving forward if Saturday goes smoothly. I really hope it does. I want to turn a tiny bit of this whole nasty coronavirus business into a small positive for our customers if we can. So please, come along on Saturday morning and support MMB if you can. Keep your distance, contactless payment at the door only and let's see if together we can make this work simply, safely and enjoyably for everyone so we can look forward to bigger and better in the very near future (do I sound like Boris? Sorry).
Megan x
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