What business stayed open at the start of the pandemic ?

[namechangeforthisi]

I've looked it up but a lot of info is vague. Did companies that were not essential, but not open to the public, stay open with social distancing measures ?

DH works in R&D. Mostly for oil and renewables industry rather than medical. The lab staff worked shifts on a skeleton crew so they did 6-12 and then it got cleaned and then the other half of the staff came in 1-7pm or similar. He is mainly analytical so he wfh most of the time but he had to go in once a week for his lab time

Business really didn't have to be essential to stay open. You just had to not be on the banned list. You could have a factory making bag charms for Accessorise and it was fine to stay open.

We stayed open as did dps, work from home with people coming in on a rota if office based, warehouse and lab remained working as before. They are supply chain but within an industry which supports critical infrastructure.

For me I was in a borderline critical service anyway, I did work from home quite a bit as many of our functions closed but I was asked to coordinate support in the community by the council for my parish which are up my time remotely and in fetching prescriptions mostly

It was really only the first couple of weeks that everything shut down pretty much beyond essentials, and we had Covid at that point anyway. Within 2 weeks most manufacturers were working out a strategy to get up and running

Supermarkets and chemists

We were classed as non essential retail. I seem to recall there were a couple weeks where you couldn't open at all, then the rules changed where you could do click and collect but not open for browsing. We had loads of website orders, so DH spent most of the first lockdown driving around the local area delivering orders.

Similar here, at the time I was half lab, half office work. We did shifts in the lab, I used to be on my own or with one other on Sundays (with lone operator procedures in place), it was weird.

My husband worked in a factory. They stayed open.

@ALovelyCupOfNameChange that's interesting. My husband's car failed its MOT 2 days before the 1st lockdown and the garage couldn't source parts for love or money because suppliers had all closed.

Some did, especially in the initial early days but once they worked out distancing etc they opened back up. I don’t remember us having much bother, but we did furlough some staff, had a good stock of common car parts and people just had to be patient.

then the government brought in the mot exemption …. Once most places had managed to work out how to work around restrictions