Thank You For Your Support
I would like to thank you all for your support over the last few months as we have all had to adjust to this pandemic. McD’s had huge plans in place for this year but like everybody else, plans and the year 2020 proved incompatible.
With lockdown approaching in mid March we had initially decided to close the cafe and then garden centre before the government decided all non essentials were to close. We also had to pause our big launch of our new garden centre in Galway Crystal which was not finished being built. Initially the website was going to follow suit but we were receiving calls to stay open and decided to put in place new measures to protect our staff and customers and see if we could continue to serve nationwide and roll out a local delivery service to look after our regular customers.
Both services experienced higher volumes than we could have foreseen and I would really like to take this moment to thank everybody for their patience. Gardening was one of the few activities people could enjoy during lockdown and my team strived to get orders to people in the most timely manner possible.
During the mad rush, we did have to close our phone lines as the small team in Loughrea needed to concentrate on fulfilling the orders whilst our customer service and web team worked remotely to deal with customers queries. This was not ideal but we worked tirelessly to answer all queries when possible.
The vast majority of enquiries have been measured and friendly: some of the warmest messages of support have been greatly appreciated. Whilst there has been a small number of less understanding messages, they were very much in the minority.
Some delays were unavoidable and outside our control on occasion. Twice we took the unprecedented decision to pause the website for new orders to help us work through the backlog. Thankfully we are now back to normal on the website for deliveries. Our suppliers too were under extreme strain and I’d like to thank them all for trying to help us keep stocked in this pandemic. Some key lines have been slower to return than normal and we did miss out on a few key items we’d normally sell at this time but please understand we are not living during normal times either when it comes to sourcing for our shops and website.
On top of this we have managed to reopen our garden centre in Loughrea and our brand new garden centre in Galway Crystal a few weeks later in June all whilst dealing with covid restrictions. I’d like to personally thank the team that successfully helped build our new centre up in a matter of weeks.
To You All, Thank you so much for showing such patience and understanding during this strange period. We appreciate your support in this difficult time in our history. As mentioned, the warm comments have been extremely well received. It is such a pleasure to witness the very best in the vast majority of people at this time.
We are doing our utmost to restock and hopefully to get back to normality. If you have shopped online with us for the first time or visited our stores recently, we hope you will pay us a return visit . We greatly appreciate all the support we have received and look forward to supplying you with great gardening supplies in the future .
Warmest regards
McD