Playtime resumes for Inverurie's youngsters
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Lots of businesses across the north-east are looking ahead to a brighter future as restrictions ease, and Inverurie's Play Town is amongst them.
Since restrictions forced them to close last March Play Town, a children's indoor play facility, has only been able to welcome customers for 10 weeks and they can't wait to open their doors again.
The blow of being shut for so long with such uncertainty has been softened for staff by the incredible amount of support that they have received from customers.
Play Town's Fiona Clegg said: "I think that when we closed Play Town Inverurie last March we thought we would be closed for a couple of months at the most and as time went on in the first lockdown it started to become quite worrying.
"We were given an initial grant which was a fantastic help but with no end in sight it did start to become a worry, I don’t think that people realise that there are still bills to pay even though we are shut.
"We celebrated our second birthday in lockdown so we were still a relatively new business.
"That’s the down side but there was a lot of support from our customers.
"We had customers who bought vouchers from us whilst we were closed and we managed to open for 10 weeks from October to Christmas."
Staff had to adapt to changes in how they could operate when they were allowed to reopen but made sure to do everything that they could to ensure maximum safety for both them and their customers.
These adaptations included stricter cleaning regimes and a reduced capacity.
Commenting, Fiona said: "It was stressful opening back up as we wanted to make sure that we were doing everything in a safe and correct manner so that staff and customers all felt safe.
"We spent a lot of time cleaning every day and fogging every night - and we spend a lot of time cleaning anyway - and we got great feedback from customers.
"Customers were delighted to be able to take their children somewhere they could play, learn and socialise with other children, and the parents were delighted to get a hot coffee and a seat.
"We had quite a few nervous children coming in who hadn’t seen others for months, but I think as we are small and homely it didn’t take too long before they felt comfortable.
"We then had to close again at Christmas and we had a lot of people with bookings.
"I emailed everyone to rearrange the bookings and I was overwhelmed by the lovely messages of support that I received from customers.
"A lot of people were happy to rebook and some people replied that they knew small businesses were having hard time and they did not want a refund so I feel very lucky to have such great support from our customers
"The closure grant that we received from January onwards has been a great help and the restart grant will also be very welcome, and these grants along with no rates until next year have gone along way in supporting small businesses.
"We cant wait to open again and are delighted to have a date to work towards; we are desperate to get open again but only once it is safe to do so and hopefully we wont have to close our red doors again."
Play Town will reopen on April 26 and bookings are now open.
