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Area businesses keep up with ‘shift’ brought on by COVID-19

By Jo Ward 5 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a prolonged impact on local businesses.

At Concord Pharmacy, orders shifted from in-store pickup to delivery and then curbside when that option was added.

"There was a shift in people coming in versus the delivery service, we've always offered delivery service we didn't change anything as far as our offering of it," said pharmacist Kate VanValkenburg. "The biggest thing was more people making use of it, which does change our work flow slightly in terms of timing and getting things done in a timely fashion, but with our overall workload, nothing changed as far as that goes."

Staff still were coming to work every day as usual, and for VanValkenburg there was the added extra issue of having three grade school age children to go home to every night.

"I'd work all day and then have to go a play teacher in the evenings; I had to rearrange my whole life."

Another big hurdle to deal with was the shortage of cleaners and things the pharmacy needed to keep running.

"One of the main things was the limiting of supplies we could get, like anything just to keep the pharmacy clean let alone when everyone is coming in for stuff to make hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol in general," pharmacist Dylan Cassidy said. "We can barely get enough to keep the store clean."

Cassidy also commented that there have been few cases of COVID-19 that they had to deal with as far as treatments go, but that still lead to shortages in the medication hydroxylchloroquine as well.

"It was just a lot of people coming in for their normal stuff, but I remember that hydroxylchloroquine was another pain because we couldn't get it, we had to limit patients to a week at a time; we would run out," Cassidy said.

"And the people that we were giving it to were using it for conditions having nothing to do with COVID-19 or any other type of upper respiratory illness that was difficult for a lot of our patients that they couldn't get the drug that was helping them with a disease that was chronic for them," VanValkenburg added.

Small stores like Cassadaga Shur Fine also have had hurdles to deal with. Their biggest issue is enforcing face mask rules.

"There've been a lot of changes," owner Paul Lehnen said. "The first month-and-a-half there was a lot of changes. We weren't sure what the rules were and that was the most difficult time for us. We began enforcing mask wearing well-before the governor did, well before the big stores did and that was stressful. A lot of people fought that very hard, got very upset so that was really crazy. And it really didn't get better until Walmart started enforcing mask wearing."

The store, however, prides itself on the clean environment that they are maintaining.

"We always try to maintain a clean environment we stepped up what we do for that," Lehnen said. "We sanitize more, we've been bringing the carts into the back and washing them on a regular basis. We're sanitizing the gas pumps, once we got a handle on that then it was just trying to stay on top of things."

Shortages still plague stores however and some issues that Shur Fine faced were deliveries of certain goods.

"There is still a shortage of things and they're weird things," Lehnen shared. "Cheese and milk deliveries get screwed up for a bit, right now there's shortages on canning supplies and hardware. Factories are concentrating on the main items and they're unable to do some of their other things. So it's a lot of random outs we have no better explanation for. Things like Lysol and such are already at peak production so they can't make anymore."

Funeral homes during the COVID-19 pandemic haven't seen much change, but according to David Dengler of Larson-Timko Funeral Home there's been a shift in the way funerals are handled.

"Thankfully we weren't inundated with the mass of coronavirus related deaths they were in places such as New York City," Dengler told the OBSERVER. "The biggest thing we had to deal with was limiting services. There is a 33% capacity cap and we strictly follow that."

Dengler spoke of how people are really good about wearing masks and they social distance as much as possible. He said that haven't had too many issues with people following rules, however it's hard as people want to console each other as it's a natural part of the grieving process.

"The support is missed, but it's there," Dengler said. "You don't want to tell them 'no, you can't do that,' but people have been good about policing themselves."

Dengler said the hardest thing for families is out-of-state relatives as those people often couldn't come to pay their respects as they would have to quarantine in New York and then when they returned home.

"The rules that are in place however are for the betterment of the community," Dengler said. "It's challenging, but we support the state mandates."

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