We are allowed to be open during lockdown, we an essential business due to animal welfare issues.
However we do have stringent measures in place to keep everybody safe, many of which will unfortunately cause queues. Here are some tips to avoid queues;
• Use our home delivery services further details can be found here; Home Delivery During Lockdown
• Phone ahead and pay for your items on the phone using your debit or credit card. Call us on arrival outside the store, we will bring your purchases to you. Be aware there may still be a slight wait depending on how busy the store is and how many staff we currently have furloughed or not. Only use this service for run of the mill purchases such as livefood and replacement bulbs etc. It’s not suitable for an animal purchase as we need to cover the care details with you, several minutes of your time will be required.
• We are, as ever, a friendly helpful bunch and want to keep you happy and content – including all the free advice and customer care we give, even if you are not buying from us. However please understand whilst we help you with free advice there may be a queue of people waiting – and some of those maybe planning to spend on a full animal set up (several hundred £££’s). We can only survive this dire economical period by keeping the cash till ringing, anybody walking away from our store is a potential nail in the coffin for any business right now. Help us stay open by limiting free advice to digital methods, not by visiting in store – or at the very least limiting your questions to vitally critical ones, short and sweet too please. Of course, as always we will spend the required time giving advice on animal purchases and equipment bought in our store – nothing will ever make us cut corners on that! :-). You can message us on here with questions, or on any of our social media platforms, we will answer quickly. We hope you will be understanding on this mater.
• When planning an animal purchase please visit us during our quieter times. We will need several minutes of your time to cover the care details, this causes large queues that maybe may even cause you to have to queue. Our quiet times tend to be mornings every day up until lunchtime, this is critical on the weekends when we get so very busy!
• As a further courtesy to your fellow customer please stick to our rules, we request that one person comes into the store for every family group whenever possible. However for animal purchases we will stretch this to two. For run of the mill purchases please come in by yourself. If you are “just looking” please don’t come at all – sorry that sounds rude and uncaring – but right now it’s not the right time during a pandemic. We can only allow a small amount of customers into the store at any times, anybody we can cut out that isn’t necessary we can get more in – this means the queues are shorter!
PLEASE, PLEASE STICK TO OUR RULES, AND REMAIN PATIENT WITH ALL OUR STAFF AND YOUR FELLOW CUSTOMERS – THANK YOU!
(and saying you know the boss won’t help with any resulting tantrum)