It is now recorded. With the exception of cafes and restaurants, shops can reopen on May 11. This was announced on Tuesday afternoon by Édouard Philippe when he presented his deconfinement plan to the National Assembly. But this resumption of activity does not mean that everything will start again as if the coronavirus was only a distant memory, far from it. It is all a "strict specification" that traders will have to respect, starting with a limitation of the number of people in each shop.
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"We will not be able to bring more than one or two people at a time into a shop"
"Of course this announcement is a relief, but at the same time we will not be able to bring more than one or two people at a time into a shop", reacts to the microphone of Europe 1 Jean-Marc Martinez, the president of the Federation of shops and artisans of Toulouse. "We will also have to make hydroalcoholic gel available to customers, not to mention that it will not be easy to ask them to avoid touching everything too much."
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A recovery that will be insufficient to cover daily expenses
After two months without activity and a cash flow that is sometimes exhausted, the stores often find themselves with large stocks. However, the reopening is not necessarily experienced as a relief. "We are allowed to open, to take back our total expense load, but we know very well that we will never have the flow of customers, nor the turnover to be able to assume it", explains Marc Friedman, the regional president of the Apparel Federation. So for businesses to survive this new ordeal, he asked the French to "take advantage of their local shops".
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Deduct the cost of masks and freezing of certain charges
"As far as society is going to favor small traders, we hope that they will find an activity", comments for her part Stéphanie Pauzat, the deputy vice-president of the Confederation of small and medium-sized enterprises. "We must be vigilant, the period is likely to be long, and with a diminished turnover we fear anyway layoffs." So to avoid this, the vice-president recommends that the cost of masks and hydroalcoholic gel be deducted "from the costs of accidents at work and occupational disease".
In addition, the traders also call for the balances to be postponed as late as possible, to enable them to face this unprecedented period.