Donal Vaughan sensed a cautious optimism on the streets of Castlebar yesterday morning.
For the first time in three months, the bulk of the town’s retail outlets were able to open their doors as the country entered Phase 2 of the Government’s roadmap, and it brought a sense of deja vu.
“I walked around the streets and was chatting to the other retailers who are opening and everyone was a bit nervous this morning,” said the Mayo footballer, speaking from his Vaughan Shoes outlet in the town yesterday.
“There was that sense of nearly opening your shop for the first time again. I said, ‘Jesus, I nearly felt the same myself’.
“Look, there’s a bit of a buzz around and it’s good. Like, in fairness, every second customer, I'm chatting to them about the sanitisers on the doors but they’re asking when is the football Championship starting as well. It’s gas.”
Vaughan also has stores in Ballinrobe and Claremorris while their website does a brisk trade too and is essentially a fourth outlet - one that kept them ticking over once they shut on March 16.
It also allowed him to retain some of his 15 staff though others, inevitably, had to avail of the Government’s COVID-19 payment.
“The Government scheme made sure that the staff are kind of looked after. That was our primary concern.
“Like all businesses, we went into survival mode, so your second concern was to make sure that there was a business for the staff to come back to and with our online store, we’d see it as one of four stores, that allowed us to trade away a bit.
“It wouldn’t make up for three stores being closed or anywhere near it but I’d be quite grateful to have it - some people didn’t have anything.
“There’s definitely an initial fear (for the business’s future), because it was so uncertain what was going to happen, in fairness. The biggest problem for most businesses is that it literally just stopped.”
Naturally, the customer experience in the shop is rather different now to what it was three months ago. Sanitisers, disposable pop-up socks, mobile screens between staff and customers are among the paraphernalia dotted around the store.
“We have special screens, made in the local shop-fitters here. We saw the design in Austria.
“They’re a mobile perspex screen that you can wheel in front of the child (when fitting shoes) and we’ve faceguards for all of the staff.
“I probably wouldn’t throw out a specific figure but like it did cost a couple of grand to get different bits. The biggest cost and ongoing cost is the use of sanitiser and everyone is using it coming into the store and all your staff are using it every half an hour or an hour.
“We put up screens on all our tills.”
Moreover, shoes that are tried on but not purchased have to be set aside for 24 hours.
“Someone could come in and try on and they want that colour and they could try it in another colour. So they could want the red one, try it in a yellow but then you have to quarantine the yellow one as well then for a day.
“So, say I didn’t have that size, I’d have to say, ‘I can’t let you try on that now because someone else has tried it, but try the other colour to figure out whether they fit you or not, but then you’ll have to come back tomorrow to get that one’.
“There’s different scenarios but, the reality is, we’re only doing it to keep people safe and people have been very understanding so far.”
Footfall was encouraging yesterday but he admits that “there’s still huge uncertainty”.
Vaughan added: “In the likes of Germany and France, what you’re hearing is businesses are doing 40-60% of the business they were doing.
“There’s a bit of pent-up demand this week or two, people that haven’t got into you, but when it averages out now over the next month you’re going to see where you’re at.”
After months of understandable pessimism, football now appears to be following retail on the comeback trail and, as GAA chiefs draw up a new Championship format for October which will be unveiled later this month, Vaughan feels they should avail of the unique circumstances and have an open draw.
He said: “I think it’d be the year to try something different. I’d be well up for the open draw, straight knockout, I think you could get some very interesting pairings and ties.
“It’d be a different way of doing it to see could you spice it up but I think from what I’m hearing, it’s going to be a provincial knockout and then getting rid of the ‘Super 8s’ and straight through.”
The clubs are afforded an initial 11-week window up to October 11 but county training is allowed to restart on September 14, which could cause conflict in some counties.
“You just need to get the club and county overlap right,” said Vaughan. “One should finish before the other should start to be fair to players who are playing both really.”
Vaughan hasn’t kicked a ball for Mayo in 2020 yet having been set to make his comeback from injury against Galway on March 15 before the curtain came down.
He explained: “I got married there before Christmas, came back after that and the hip flexors were an issue a couple of sessions.
“I was probably going to be involved for the Galway game so I trained on the Wednesday, the whole lot, ready for road and then the lockdown came on that Thursday.
“I’m 100% now again and have had a good rest as well. To be honest, it was nice to tick away on your own schedule as well and train when you wanted to train and stuff, try and do a bit of home gym and just going out to find a park to do a running session.”
