Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Adam Donnelly

TWO SHOPPING WEEKS LEFT!

Kamloops businesses hope Christmas shoppers continue to support local

Dec 10, 2020 | 5:19 PM

KAMLOOPS — Just two weeks remain for the citizens of Kamloops to finish their Christmas shopping. Downtown Kamloops Executive Director Carl DeSantis has two words for those folks:

“Support local,” DeSantis says. “The message this year, more than ever, we need to reinforce with everybody is doing your Christmas shopping locally.”

Crooked Crown launched its website in March for online sales, just as the pandemic shut many local businesses down. The store opened a few months later, with owner Emily Sedgwick unsure how the business would fare.

“We kind of threw all expectations out the window in March,” Sedgwick says. It’s been better than we expected in some ways. I think the drive to support local has really ramped up with the pandemic.”

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To compete with online retailers, Sedgwick has partnered with a Kamloops delivery company to give shoppers a local option when buying on the worldwide web. She says since the COVID-19 regulations were tightened in November, the store has seen an increase in sales through the website.

“We’ve noticed more online sales,” Sedgwick says. “We’ve also introduced local delivery, but we’re not sure if those deliveries and online sales are going up because it’s Christmas time, or because people just aren’t going shopping out and about anymore.”

According to a recent report from Statistics Canada, during August 2020, smaller businesses were more likely to report significant revenue losses as a result of the pandemic. In fact, almost a quarter of businesses with fewer than 20 employees reported they’d experienced a 40 per cent or greater decline in revenue compared to August 2019. That’s why DeSantis believes it’s more important than ever to seek out locally-run businesses.

“So important,” DeSantis says. “Here you can go in and touch and try on something before you purchase it and appreciate it. [Small business owners] will do whatever they can to earn your business down here.”

This Christmas will be a first for Sedgwick as a retailer. She’s hopeful her customers continue to support Crooked Crown over the coming months until we can bring the pandemic under control.

“It’s still trending up, so we’ll just keep going as we are and hope that people will continue to support local,’ Sedgwick says. “There’s still going the Valentine’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries, Easter. Hopefully, people will still be shopping, and shopping local.”