The box of masks were out by the front door. The hand sanitizer station was ready. The one-way directional arrows lined the aisle floors.
By 1 p.m. Monday, Concord’s Viking House – a Main Street Scandinavian gift shop – was missing only one thing: customers.
On day one of New Hampshire’s partial re-opening, Concord store owners and employees were ready to go. Patrons, though, were in short supply.
As a smattering of Main Street stores turned on their lights and flashed open signs, bursts of rain and the usual Monday crawl kept foot traffic low. But this time there’s another factor: a deadly, unpredictable virus, and a general sense of unease. Even with the stores open, many customers are playing it safe at home.
“People still want to support local, thank goodness,” said Diane Beauregard, owner of Things Are Cooking, a Main Street kitchen store. “But I do think it’s going to be a slow go for quite a while.”
It’s not for lack of enthusiasm. As Gov. Chris Sununu partially lifted restrictions on retail outlets, salons and golf courses Monday, Concord establishments have moved to reopen their doors – cautiously.
In order to reopen Monday, retail outlets are required to keep stores to 50% capacity, offer masks to customers, keep hand sanitizer at the ready and protect employees.
For Sue McCoo, owner of Hilltop Consignment Gallery, Viking House and Concord Craftsman and Romance Jewelers, meeting those thresholds required tricky logistics. But it was worth it, she said, in more ways than one.
“I was missing people,” McCoo said, standing behind the checkout counter at Hilltop in a mask. “Not just for business reasons, but I was missing not talking to anybody. So there was that.”
Beauregard, who has owned Things Are Cooking since 2011, also jumped at the reopening opportunity. Despite some curbside pickup sales, the revenue flow for her store has been significantly stunted, she said. Walk-ins are the only way to turn that around.
So far, some customers have come through. On Monday afternoon, Sally Cole was one of the happy few, wandering the shelves with a cloth mask and an armful of stirring utensils.
“I have three birthdays coming up,” she said. “So I need gifts.” She had come to Main Street looking for a Hail Mary option; she had found a cooking store.
For now, Beauregard and other store owners are playing a waiting game. If they open now, they can ride out a trial period where customers get used to the idea of taking precautions, many say. In a few weeks, if COVID-19 cases in New Hampshire show improvement, more may venture out.
“I’m definitely seeing downtown start to wake up again,” said Tim Sink, president of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce. “Some of the longer-term retailers came back to life.”
Large retail groups had been pressing for a re-opening for weeks ahead of Sununu’s announcement.
David Simon, whose national company, Simon Property Group, owns the Mall of New Hampshire – as well as Merrimack Premium Outlets and two more malls in Nashua and Salem – had written a letter April 29 urging a reopening of retail in New Hampshire and laying out a series of voluntary steps the malls would take to combat the spread of the virus.
That included continually disinfecting surfaces, occupancy limits, mobile checkout and employee temperature checks before allowing them to work.
It did not, however, include a requirement that customers wear masks. Rather, it had instructions that they be “encouraged” to do so.
On Monday, with new state guidelines in effect, all of those malls reopened.
In Concord, the picture is more mixed. A significant portion of local stores in the heart of the city have now opened – from Joe King’s Shoe Shop to the Pompanoosuc Mills furniture store. But many of the big box stores on Loudon Road remained closed. That included T.J. Maxx and JCPenney, two of the city’s biggest clothing retailers.
And not all Main Street stores are choosing to reopen to foot traffic, either. Gibson’s Bookstore, which closed early in the pandemic and switched to local delivery and curbside pickup, is not reopening until May 26, at which point it will launch a new “shop by appointment” feature.
Starting then, book shoppers and browsers will be let in every half hour in groups; each group will be allowed 50 minutes to browse in the store, with masks required and six feet of separation enforced.
There’s a simple reason to delay, Gibson’s owner Michael Herrmann said: It’s not necessary.
“The governor’s stay-at-home advisory is still in effect until the end of the month,” he said. “Believe me, we don’t feel any rush to throw open our doors. The science hasn’t changed.”
And moving slowly means that the store can adapt, Herrmann said. “The slower you phase it in, the more capable you are to phase it back,” he said. “If there were new cases in New Hampshire, we’d want to scale back.”
Other stores are waiting until June.
As businesses weigh their strategies, Sununu has stressed that the re-opening is not a free pass for store owners.
In a May 8 follow-up letter to Simon, Sununu warned that officials with the state “will be monitoring the dynamics in New Hampshire’s malls with a careful eye to ensure safety.”
If the guidance is not followed, Sununu wrote in the letter, “I will not hesitate to reassess my position on allowing shopping malls to open.”
If retail was crawling back to life, golf courses were booming Monday.
“We’ve been busy,” said Phil Davis, the head golf professional at Beaver Meadow Golf Club on Monday morning. Since 7:30 in the morning, the club had booked up its tee times through 5 p.m.
Overall, the club is expecting between 160 and 180 golfers, Davis said – with just over half of them pre-existing members.
Davis said that the state’s required 12-minute spacing between tee times has helped keep golfers socially distanced. That’s four minutes longer than the non-COVID norm.
“It makes it very easy for us to stage our carts,” he said.
Most of the golfers have worn masks, Davis said. And new golfers are checking in remotely under a tent system; the clubhouse remains closed.
As for Main Street, store owners are bracing to settle into a new normal. Some, like Beauregard, aren’t sure when stores will be back to “normal.”
“I think it’s going to be a while,” said Beauregard. “Which is a little scary.”
But to Sink, at the Chamber of Commerce, the willingness of local stores to try their hand at a quick reopening is a hopeful sign. And while a majority of stores are not yet open, he hoped those that did could inspire a trend.
“I think it’s a great start,” he said. “What’ll happen, the other folks will be looking around and say, ‘you know what, I guess we’ll follow suit.’ ”
Now, he says, it’s all down to the customers.
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, at (603) 369-3307, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)