Hello, I’m Austin Cooke, retail director at Dealz & Poundland, and responsible for our 850 shops in the Republic of Ireland and UK.
Of course, these are not normal times, but I wanted to summarise all the steps we’ve taken over the past 72 hours to ensure you can still shop at Dealz and Poundland with confidence.
Firstly, I wanted to tell you we’re open. We know, as a little-and-often food and essentials store on a high street close to home, you’re relying on us more than ever right now to be there. Not least because we know many of you walk to our stores. While we may have to vary some of our opening hours, we’ll do our best to avoid that and you have my word we’ll do whatever it takes to stay open for you.
These are the steps we’ve taken to make sure we can.
- Nothing is more important to us than the highest standards of hygiene. From washing hands every 20 minutes to cleaning key surfaces each hour, we’re making sure our shops, from front to back, are pristine.
- Where you queue, we’ve put down floor markers to ensure you can remain at an appropriate distance from each other. Please respect your fellow shoppers when waiting in line.
- We’re following all government and health advice to the letter and we’re asking you to help us, by doing the same.
- Where possible we’re asking you to use cards at the checkout to limit cash handling – that’s better for you and us. However, we’re retaining a cash option on our self-checkouts, and while we’d prefer our manned tills to be card-only we’ll continue to accept cash.
- The majority of what we sell is food and household items and most of those everyday essentials come from the UK so you can rely on us for the things you need. However, we’ve limited sales of some faster-selling items to three per customer. This is simply to ensure everyone has access to them.
- One thing that isn’t changing is our promise to deliver amazing value. We don’t intend to move prices and behind the scenes we’re working hard with suppliers to make sure we can keep that promise.Finally, I’d like to ask you to consider doing something for us.Our colleagues – especially those in our stores, in our warehouses and driving our trucks, are going to extraordinary lengths right now. It goes without saying we’ll do everything we can over the weeks ahead to support them.
Those colleagues – key workers – are your friends and neighbours and they deserve nothing but respect for choosing to stand by their communities to ensure you and your families have access to the things you need.
They cannot work from home and I know they very much appreciate any words of thanks from you.
I and my 18,000 colleagues are here for you.
Austin