Business owner sprouts flower power with a timely reopening
NORTH SMITHFIELD — Gov. Gina Raimondo would be proud of Elaine Morisseau.
The day before Mother’s Day isn’t just the second-busiest of the year for Morisseau’s eponymous Elaine’s Flowers, it also happened to be the first when non-essential retailers like hers were allowed to welcome back customers for in-store service – with appropriate social-distancing restrictions, of course.
But the flavor of mercantile activity at Elaine Flowers wasn’t very different Saturday than it’s been for the last few weeks. Embracing the spirit of Raimondo’s directives, Morisseau is taking the slow lane on the road back to the more familiar ways of transacting business. She didn’t even unlock the front door.
“There are no customers in the store to speak of,” Morisseau said Saturday. “I’ve been going to the door and handing them flowers here at the shop. They call me when they get here or they knock on the door. It’s the same thing basically.”
Usually, the shop at 580 Great Road is full of customers on Mother’s Day, which is only slightly less hectic than Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year for Elaine’s Flowers.
Morisseau says the conditions are partly the result of her own concerns about keeping workers safe and partly that of an apparent change in the behavior of customers – which she hopes is temporary. They seem to be fine with having flowers delivered to them at home right now, and they’ve been keeping Elaine’s very busy of late.
“We’re doing no-contact deliveries where we call customers to make sure they’re home,” she says. “We deliver and we leave them at the door or on their porch or wherever they want us to leave them.”
Saturday marked the beginning of what Raimondo has called Phase 1 of an incremental march toward the resumption of normal economic and social activity. With gatherings of greater than five people still prohibited, Raimondo lifted the general stay-at-home order which had been in place for about six weeks; reopened a dozen state parks and recreation areas, including Lincoln
Woods State Park and Pulaski Park in Glocester; and encouraged Rhode Islanders to begin shopping again at stores that were previously shuttered or downscaled because they were considered non-essential.
But the relief also comes with the threat of enforcement if retailers fail to police customer traffic for social-distancing compliance. The state Department of Business Regulation is promulgating rules that call for no more than one customer per 300 square feet of space and a minimum of six feet of distance between each other. DBR also wants see-through barriers between employees and customers at checkout areas. Masks are mandatory for all.
The governor says the state will, as she put it, “bend over backwards” in attempts to enable businesses to comply with the guidelines voluntarily, but she also signed an executive order to calls for a graduated schedule of fines for renegade retailers that repeatedly flout the directives. Although she hopes it doesn’t happen, the order also empowers state officials to shut down egregiously non-compliant businesses.
“You can go shopping,” Raimondo said during Friday’s briefing from the State House. “Just follow the rules. Wear your mask. Keep six feet away from people. Don’t go if you’re sick and don’t crowd up in line or in the store.”
Morisseau and Raimondo may be on the same page for now – but that doesn’t mean she has to like it.
“I don’t want things to be this way forever,” she says. “I don’t want this to be the new normal.”
As onerous as they are, the restrictions are only the latest challenge Morisseau has been dealing with since the months leading up to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, around the end of February.
Morisseau was attending a meeting of her book club in Woonsocket last Oct. 22 when she fell down and broke both ankles. While she was supposed to be recovering in the hospital, she suffered a heart attack.
Later, she was discharged to St. Antoine’s Residence for two weeks, then spent two more weeks doing occupational therapy at the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island.
She made it back to work shortly before Valentine’s Day, but she was still a bit shaky. It was only a couple weeks after that that “this whole pandemic thing” ramped up and Raimondo began shutting down restaurants and non-essential businesses.
As bad as the injury and the recovery were, Morisseau doesn’t think they were as stressful and disruptive as what she’s facing now.
“This is worse than that,” she says. It’s been an exasperating, one-thing-after-another hill to climb for Morisseau, whose been running the family business for many years. It’s connected to another business she runs, The Country Mouse gift shop.
Elaine’s was founded in Woonsocket 60 years ago by her parents, Terry and Charlie Nys. Morisseau was just three years old at the time and her mother named the business after her. Her father passed away some time ago but her mother is 94 years old and now lives next door to the flower shop. Until a few years ago, says Morisseau, her mother was still doing chores in the shop.
Now Morisseau works in the store with her daughter, Rachel.
“We’re three generations,” says Morisseau.
Even though they’re family, mother and daughter continue to do their civic duty at work. As they painstakingly trim and arrange cut flowers at the worktable in the back of the store, scissors in hand, they wear cloth masks and do their best not to get too close.
And Morisseau can’t wait to stop. “I don’t think anybody is not looking forward to it,” she says. “I want business to be the way it was.”