By Mark Jubelirer
Co-owner, Reyers Shoe Store
SHARON, Pa. – Reyers expects 2021 will be a great year compared to last year. How could it not be?
Our management’s consensus is that we’ll get to a new and recognizable normal. By year’s end our net sales will be more comparable to 2019 than 2020.
Q1 will be more difficult this year. Covid will preclude almost everybody from crossing our threshold. It’ll be the usual dull frigid greyness. Everybody who needed boots will have already purchased them – and mostly online.
Reyers will still be ready for those who didn’t go about buying a new pair already, or whose dog had just chewed them up.
Our fabulous collection from last fall went under-appreciated. So we’ll be always ready to sell some great boots as well as the recent most-necessary commodity – athletic shoes. And there’s a Rite Aid next door. You can pick up a pair as you venture out to get your vaccine.
Q1 will be worse this year than last year. But Q2 will be all blue skies and sunshine. Because we’ll at least be open. And more people will be getting their shots every day. And the year of America’s worst election season will be in our rearview mirror.
As Americans will be finally freed to roam once more, we humans will be born again with an eagerness to socialize at malls, scream at horror movies together, get vital makeovers at the salon, go to concerts and dance our tails off.
And perchance to shop downtown again. To go out and touch and feel once again, to see and be seen, to hand a credit card to an actual living being, rather than one’s keyboard. This will be Q2. It will be better than last year by a long shot.
Q3 will be better yet. It will act like 2019. There will be an actual back-to-school season. Reyers will celebrate its 135th anniversary this fall, full of giveaways and fantasy and sale prices.
We’ll market our business with renewed vigor. Our product collections will be fabulous. Our staff will be eager to please. That is the one thing that will not have changed. Our success has always come from our employees. They win national service awards all the time.
Q4 will be full of exciting holidays that we shall celebrate together. It will have been so long. And the animosities and anxieties of 2020’s last quarter will fade from our consciousness. We’ll buy and receive Christmas presents that we can open together.
Families will celebrate.
Our American family will celebrate.