The blog led them on quests to try new vegan products, restaurants and recipes, Carlo says. “We started off as bloggers,” Giardina explains, under the name “The Food Duo.” Over the years, as their diets shifted from omnivorous to vegetarian to vegan, the content of their blog followed suit. Two weeks before the state issued its first COVID-19 orders, Giardina and Lanni were sitting comfortably in their store’s backroom “events area,” recalling their journey onto the vegan grocer scene. “But,” Lanni says, “it’s not the way I would prefer to make them.” The week Pennsylvania ordered all non-essential businesses to close, the shop sold around 200 units, she says. “I’ve had to order more tofu than I ever imagined I would need,” she laughs. They’ve been in constant communication with suppliers to fill depleting shelves. She has been running numbers to determine what inventory shipments she might need to adjust almost every day. “It’s really hard for me to forecast what we’ll need because everything’s changing so quickly.” “I have to design reports and figure out how much bread we’re going to need 48 hours from now,” she says. Customers have been booking deliveries, mostly via Mercato, for up to a week in advance.
There’ve been a lot of early mornings and late evenings. “For a two-person operation, to knock out 30 orders a day is a lot,” Lanni says. The mom-and-pop grocers pack all orders by hand.
Boxes sit where product display tables used to be and pickup orders chill in frozen display cases. “We’re in no position to be as organized as we usually are right now just because of the rate that orders are coming in,” she explains.Ĭlad in black balaclavas and blue plastic gloves, and disinfecting surfaces as frequently as possible, the pair jokes that the store has become V Marks the Warehouse since they shifted to a delivery- and pick-up-only system. Since then, it has been crazy, Lanni says. They saw their first spike in orders the week of March 15 when Pennsylvania issued social distancing orders. Instead of enjoying a laidback gathering with customers, vegan corner store owners Carmella Lanni and Carlo Giardina found themselves caught in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of March, busily filling customer orders, managing their rapidly changing inventory selection and hustling boxed deliveries out their shop’s front window. Things didn’t go as planned on V Marks the Shop’s first anniversary.
0 kommentar(er)
