Latest Covid Restrictions – We Are OPEN

The government has just announced another almost full lockdown, similar to the one in March. Non essential retail and hospitality businesses must close from Thursday, you must work from home where possible, households must not mix (except for support bubbles) etc. As with the March lockdown we will be remaining OPEN. As we provide food and hygiene products for animals we are classed as an essential business and can stay open under the new rules. We will however have to make some small changes

When restrictions were relaxed, we were able to let more customer groups in at one time (we settled on three as this still allowed some social distancing in our rather small store). However, with the new guidelines and I am afraid the behaviour towards staff of some members of the public, we may have to restrict this further from time to time. In reality this will only have a small effect but it may mean you will have to wait for entry for a couple of minutes. To minimize wait times we would ask customers who know before hand what they want to pre-order their supplies by telephone or alternatively use our click and collect service available through our webstore (telephone is generally better). This just speeds up our checkout and will go along way to keeping queues to a minimum.

Obviously with potentially allowing fewer customer groups in at a time we cannot allow general viewing of the animals. Whilst people are looking at the animals that are on display (because their enclosures cannot be moved) just out of interest, someone else could be waiting out in the cold to be served, which is just not fair. It has been suggested that we should black out the enclosures we cannot move but I would rather treat our customers as adults and rely on them to be sensible. We will put up explanatory notices and ask customers to desist if it does happen, please do not be offended, we are just trying to keep it fair for everyone. If you are genuinely interested in purchasing an animal, please make this known to us when you come in and let us know what animal you are interested in first. We cannot accommodate request such as “I want to buy a pet” – “Which one?” – “I don’t know let me have a look at what you have”. We have a lot, it takes too long, you should know a little about the animal before you try to buy it in any case. All our current livestock is on our website and can be viewed before coming to the store.

We also still have our FREE local delivery service running (not for animals, you must come to the store to purchase an animal). Just telephone us your order and we will bring it to your door on the designated day for your area (generally two alternative evenings a week for each local area). We can also deliver further out for a small charge on Friday evenings (Stroud, the Forest etc.). At the moment we are open until 5:30pm and start our deliveries from then. However if the service grows rapidly in popularity again, as it did during the first lockdown, we may have to adjust our closing time to allow us to complete more deliveries per day. Watch this space!

We thank you in advance for you patience and recognise that our genuine customers have worked hard with us to enable the business to remain open and operating as well as it can with the restrictions placed on us all.

Unfortunately, as we do have livestock in store, we do attract a lot of people who are not customers and just like to have somewhere to bring their children to kill some time or just to treat us as a free zoo. We have had a significant number of incidents of abuse aimed of staff since the first lockdown and it is generally with these groups or with others who refuse to follow the guidelines on social distancing, masks, numbers in the store etc. I don’t like to have to re-iterate it but we will not tolerate any abuse, verbally or physically, you will be ejected from the store and where we deem it appropriate the police will be called (as with the idiot who for some reason threatened to run me over, rape my mother, attack my daughter and burn the shop down!) Yep, that’s what we have to deal with!

Unless you are wishing to make a purchase please follow the government’s advice and “Stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives”. If you are coming to the store to make a purchase or collect an order please “Wash hands, cover face and make space”. We are all in this together and we will do our bit to make your shopping experience as easy and stress free as we can, please do the same for us so we can remain open throughout.

The Angell Pets Team