STAYING CLOSE TO HOME
Pierre Jasmin moves some of the statues for sale at Pépinière Jasmin. With many families’ summer vacation plans wiped out by the pandemic, people have been spending money on garden items, barbecues and bicycles. Susan Schwartz reports.
Montrealer André Giroux and his family were planning to spend their summer vacation in the Maritimes — until COVID-19 put a dent in those plans.
Closed borders, quarantines and social-distancing exigencies dictated by the pandemic have pretty well ruled out long-distance travel. Like many Quebecers, the Giroux family will be staying close to home this summer, maybe cycling around town or taking short trips outside the city.
Which is how on Wednesday morning Giroux and his daughters, Lily-rose and Michaëlla, came to be in a socially distanced lineup 14 people deep outside Bicycles MCW in Notre-dame-de-grâce. They were picking up a new bicycle for Lily-rose; her mother, Natalie Ouellet, will take over her old one, her father and sister already have bikes and, with a new rack to accommodate all four two-wheelers, they’ll be set for a summer of cycling.
Attractions including zoos, gardens and agri-tourism farms reopen as of Friday, as do tourist welcome and information centres. The province is offering incentives to encourage Quebecers to vacation chez nous, including a discount on annual passes for the agency that operates provincial parks.
But for many Quebecers, this will be the summer of the staycation. And that means items like bicycles and barbecues are practically flying out of stores; it means business at gardening centres is way up as legions plant vegetable gardens and beautify their backyards; and it means swimming-pool companies are already booked for the season.
“Forty years of my life in this business and I have never seen what is going on now,” said Bicycles MCW manager Bruno Mastantuono. “Bike shops are doing phenomenally.” Shortages and long waits mean that “people are calling for bicycles from all over the country — and even from the United States.”
Customers include couples and sometimes entire families, he said. Some are first-time buyers, and a good portion are people who haven’t ridden in 25 years. A combination of factors is responsible, Mastantuono said: for one thing, gyms have been closed (they can reopen Monday), and not everyone wants to travel by public transportation.
“People are fed up with staying home. They’re not going on vacation; they’re not going to restaurants,” he said.
“We have to do something with ourselves.”
At Hogg Hardware, barbecue sales are up 30 to 40 per cent, said George Hogg. And sales of charcoal barbecues, which normally make up 25 per cent of barbecue sales, “are probably double what they usually are.”
That people have more time might be a factor, he suggested. “People are trying to be creative with their time. Charcoal takes time and it takes thinking. It’s a bit of a commitment.
“COVID is terrible,” Hogg said. He’s not minimizing that. But if the pandemic has a silver lining, it’s that “it has kind of turned on things in people that had been shut down.”
Like the desire to garden. Sales of gardening materials at Hogg Hardware, which has stores in Westmount and on Nuns’ Island, “are going crazy,” he said.
Pierre Jasmin of Pépinière Jasmin said he has not seen a season like this in the 30 years he has been involved in the business. Since the store reopened April 18, sales have been 25- to 30-per-cent higher than usual — high enough that they have run out of some products.
Many customers bought plants and started vegetable gardens, but they have also been making highend impulse purchases, Jasmin said.
When the St-laurent store reopened, people waited in line for 30 to 40 minutes to get in because of social distancing. Having invested the time, they were serious about shopping once they got in, buying expensive items including statuary and fountains — perhaps spending the budget they had set aside for travel, Jasmin said.
Traffic in the lawn and garden sector of Home Hardware Stores Ltd. is double what it was last year across Canada, said Mario Durocher, Quebec’s director of operations. “Many of our customers decided to spend their vacations at home, tackling home projects they have wanted to get done for some time — whether it’s building a new patio or a beautiful backyard oasis,” he said.
Everything to do with the garden has been hugely popular this season, said François Riopel of Riopel Centre de rénovation, a Home Hardware store in Ste-adèle. “People want to grow tomatoes and vegetables themselves, to plant their own garden.”
In addition, paint sales are up and people have been buying materials to build such structures as backyard cabanas. “More people will be spending their vacations at home and they want it to be nice,” he said.
Mark Fournier, president of Laval-based Piscines Bonaventure, which builds cement in-ground pools, said sales would usually be complete through to late July or early August at this point in the season. But this year sales are complete almost to the end of October. People who decide now to have a pool put in won’t have their work started until the end of October or next May.
“It’s one of the craziest summers we have seen in a long, long time,” he said. “It’s just through the roof. ... Everyone’s numbers are up.”
Fournier said it reminds him of the “cocooning” trend of the 1980s, when lifestyle guru Faith Popcorn coined the term to describe the need to retreat from the realities of life.
The last time he remembers things being this busy was after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “It scared so many people, they shut down and decided they were staying home.”