One of the owners of Freeds is describing the reopening of his clothing store on Ottawa Street in Windsor as "a process."
Dan Orman says the store reopened on Wednesday May 20 amid the COVID-19 pandemic with a number of safety measures been put in place for his staff and customers.
"We have to be so careful and so cognisant of how we take care of the customers and that's first and for most in our training, in our retraining of what we want our staff to do," says Orman. "We were a hugging type of business, we hugged our customers. They come in we give them hugs and handshakes making sure their experience is great as possible."
Orman says part of the process is to get customers to feel comfortable and come back to the store again to shop and in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, he thought the closure would have lasted a couple of weeks, not a couple of months.
"Obviously throughout my career, been at this thing for 36 years, we have never never experienced that even in a store like ours that's been around for 90 years," he says. "I mean you have great depressions and you have things when you been open for 90 years, you go through a lot of different things."
Despite reopening, Orman says as of now, not all staff members have been called back.
"It's all predicated on the traffic flow," he says. "Most of our full time staff has been called back but we are not open the same amount of hours that we were open prior to closing so we cut back our hours to accommodate the traffic flow as best as we can."
Freeds is also offering virtual and curbside shopping.