We continue to look into the lives of our Valley population to get a glimpse of their day-to-day experiences within the pandemic.
The Small Grocery Store Owner
“I have been open for every day of my life for 30 years,” Stéphane Bouchard, owner of Dépanneur Multi-Dep in Ormstown, proudly announces. This pandemic hasn’t closed his small grocery store. Bouchard has been 38 years in the business, sometimes operating two stores. His store on Church St. employs seven employees, including two students. When rumblings began about COVID-19 and its possible ramifications, Bouchard listened closely to the situation. And when Dr. Blonde, a customer, suggested putting a clear plastic panel at his cash register, to safeguard his employees and clients alike, Bouchard wasted no time before installing it.
Even before the government outlined such health protocols, Dépanneur Multi-Dep had tape on the floor directing customer traffic, hand sanitizer bottles throughout the store, and was enforcing a maximum of six customers in the store at one time. Multi-Dep is affiliated with the Métro chain of groceries so Bouchard is updated as to all new measures. But perhaps the defining event for Bouchard was when the Couche-Tard store in Sainte-Martine was forced to close because of a COVID-19 contamination. The store’s employees were quarantined, the store disinfected, and a new staff was sent in. “Couche-Tard has many [other] stores where the staff can be moved from,” Bouchard says. “I can’t do that!” He must make sure that he has a three-person shift during the day when the inventory and stocking the shelves is done, so he cannot scale down the number of his employees.
Multi-Dep offers customers a little bit of everything. During the pandemic, meat sales have doubled and sometimes Bouchard finds that there are shortages of some products — like the time Pepsi was unable to provide 2-litre bottles. “They cut out orders to small businesses to be able to fill orders to big ones,” he says. Lottery tickets are no longer sold in stores. They bring in too many people, and “the scratch-ticket clientele is 75 percent over [the age of] 50,” he says, not the demographic that should be crowding into the store. Lottery tickets are being sold online, so that cuts out the middleman, but whatever Multi-Dep loses in revenue one place it is making up in another. As the Native tobacco stores are now closed, people who went there are instead buying their cigarettes in places like his.
Bouchard’s store is busy. “When people were waiting outside Super C for an hour I was doing excellent business,” he states. Customers came to pick up essential items then went back to Super C after the crowds were gone to get the rest of their order. “When people see too many people they don’t want to go there.”
Bouchard’s customers are from many different walks of life. “Sometimes people come in the store and I’m the only person that they will see all day so they talk to me, and talk, and continue talking to me,” he laughs. “People are sometimes stressed out and some don’t seem to care about it at all.” He listens to them all. When talking about the health-care workers, Bouchard speaks with reverence: “I’m in the front line, but they are in the firing line.” Lately he has noticed the change in the mood of his clientele. “People are thinking differently and they are going to be thinking differently for a long time.”