Originally Posted by
The Lone Gunman
I walk up Queen Street most days of the week on the way home from work. The most obvious difference is the amount of people who are out and about. During the first two or three weeks of the lockdown, you could walk from one end of Queen Street to the other in mid-afternoon and see maybe five or six other people in total. The numbers began increasing steadily from about week four onward to the point where this week there have been a couple of hundred people on occasions.
Until recently, Sainsburys had somebody on the door limiting the number of people entering at any one time. They don't now. The same is true at Poundland, where one of the two shops was open and a security guard was limiting numbers. Now the second shop has reopened and there's nobody on the door of either store.
The M&S food hall has been open throughout, but no other items have been available for sale and numbers inside the shop have been limited. They started selling clothes and home items about three or four weeks ago and yesterday there was nobody on the door. It was the busiest that I've seen it in the food hall for months, including pre-lockdown.
Boots had one side door open and were operating a one in, one out system a few weeks back. Now the main doors are wide open and unmanned. Same story with Superdrug.
KFC and Pizza Hut were doing deliveries only until this week, so the only people you'd see there were Deliveroo riders. Now they are both doing counter collections for the public and KFC has some sort of machine system in operation for placing orders (I haven't actually been in there, so I don't know how it works, but the doors are open again).
The fruit seller opposite Tesco has been back in business this week for the first time since the lockdown began. The cycle shop at the station end on the other side of the road is also open again now (I think it reopened last week).
The banks have been open but very quiet until the last couple of weeks. They now seem to have more staff and more customers. Specsavers is also open to some degree - not sure how that's working but I've seen customers in there for the first time this week.