Greenwood retailers are adjusting to the state’s shelter-at-home order, but there’s still a bit of confusion about the rules for who can stay open and who must abide by new rules.
Citizens have wondered why small retailers who have gift shops or clothing stores have had to close their doors while franchise stores in the Greenwood West Shopping Center appear to be open for business.
Take, for example, the shopping center’s Walmart, Dollar Tree and Dirt Cheap. They sell groceries and “essentials” that allow them to remain open, but they are required to observe social distancing rules inside the stores. At Walmart, customers enter through one set of doors and leave through another. At Dirt Cheap, some sections have been roped off, but on Thursday there were shopping for items such as clothing. They can do the same at Walmart.
“We sell like food, diapers and toilet paper. And basic canned goods,” explained Erica Howard, a manager at Dirt Cheap.
Floyd Bailey leaves Dirt Cheap on Thursday. Behind him on a table are boxes of cereal and other groceries.
On Wednesday, downtown Greenwood retailer Melisa Fincher was shopping at Dollar Tree when she noticed activity at a couple of stores in the shopping center and saw what appeared to her to be customers entering one of them. The stores do not sell the essentials required for remaining open.
Fincher’s shop sells gifts and clothing, including Easter attire, and she has built an active online business.
She explained that she had been looking at the losses her business was encountering because of the outbreak and shelter-at-home rules and became upset. The situation, she said, “made my blood start boiling.”
In the end, Fincher decided to continue keeping the doors to her store locked. When the shelter-at-home order was announced last week, she talked to a state official who eventually told her, “You are not to do curbside. You are not to deliver. You can go to work as long as you have a website or social media that you ship from and the carrier has to go inside and pick it up.”
Fincher is nonplussed. “The issue is, with economy spiraling down like it is, it is going end up being a worse situation than the virus.”
Some downtown retailers are conducting curbside pickups but are not selling the items on the sidewalk.
Mayor Carolyn McAdams said enforcement to some extent is “is left to the discretion of each individual city and each individual mayor.”
She had received complaints about one of the stores in Greenwood West Shopping Center, so she drove out to check. “Every door was locked, and it had a sign out there saying it was temporarily closed,” she said.
McAdams said, “The police are monitoring this situation very heavily right now. We are diligent about it because we are trying to get past this coronavirus and stop these deaths.”
Officers are visiting scofflaws, particularly about crowds inside and outside their stores. The officers explain the rules and check back to make sure they are being followed, she said. On a third visit, lawbreakers will be fined $1,000.
“We are going to talk to you twice, and then we are not going to talk to you again,” the mayor said.
The same applies to people in crowds: “Pretty soon, the individuals are going to start getting the $1,000 violation, too.”
She continued, “Right now, this takes priority and precedence over anything else. ... One day, and hopefully soon, we can get to the business of making money and making people happy and being our normal selves.”
•Contact Susan Montgomery at 581-7233 or smontgomery@gwcommonwealth.com.
