Mr and Mrs Jagpal have been nominated for the Shop Local, Shop Little Heroes Award.
When the COVID-19 outbreak began there was a huge spike in sales. In order to ensure their customers got a fair share of their stock, they had made the decision to place limits on essentials, even before the supermarkets did. Promotions were kept running, ensuring customers would get the best value. Mr and Mrs Jagpal were able to push their Facebook page, giving daily live updates to customers to let them know what would come in deliveries, saving their customers the journey if they did not have what was needed.
They also worked closely with unconventional suppliers including bakers to source hard to find items including flour, eggs and bread.
Mr and Mrs Jagpal shop is nearby the Southampton General Hospital, they often speak with the hard working staff working there. The ambulance service had ran out of hand sanitiser, the couple managed to source 10 litres and donated it to the ambulances. A further 10 litres was made available to customers who would make a donation in exchange for the sanitiser. All of the money from this was donated to the Hampshire Air Ambulance. Face masks were also donated to nurses and more recently one of their customers made a number of elasticated head bands to make the face mask more comfortable, these were offered free of charge to all NHS workers who are wearing masks for many hours per day.
One of their customers said:
“It’s a store I’ve only really visited before to drop off parcels, but that’ll now change. This evening, after a soul destroying walk around the big Tesco down the road with all of its empty shelves I stopped off here on the way home. They had everything except for toilet roll. They were limiting the number of items each customer could purchase, their prices were the same as always, and after a conversation with both the owner and his son, I had so much respect for the way this small business is running their store.”
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