How Waterloo's T&T Supermarket has weathered COVID-19

Will Liu says he found himself feeling nervous in the spring of 2020 when COVID-19 began to take hold in Waterloo region.

The store manager for T&T Supermarket in Waterloo said they started taking staff temperatures in February, even before the first case of COVID-19 was found in the region, and they put safety measures in place. The store was the first in the region to require people to wear masks while working and shopping and the first to take customer temperatures.

"At the beginning, we tried to explain very clearly to the customer why we're doing this and it's this kind of teamwork ... so we need everybody to support it," he said.

He said even with all of that, they weren't prepared for what happened.

"Everything happened so quick so nobody could have been prepared," he said. "Supermarkets are an essential business and everybody is a frontline worker."

He said they knew they had to make sure people felt comfortable to shop in the store so they could feed themselves, but they initially saw a 40 per cent drop in customers in March 2020. When a COVID-19 assessment centre opened in the same plaza, Liu said there were evenings when no one was in the store.

"When they opened the first day, I clearly remember, almost no customers were in our store," he said.

"People [were] very nervous, not only the customers, even our employees, even myself, since during that time, the people going to that assessment centre, they must have had symptoms," he said.

That led people "to run away from the T&T Supermarket" because they may have assumed people going to the assessment centre were also stopping into the store, Liu said.

Anti-Asian racism felt locally

Some Asian business owners in Waterloo region have expressed concerns about anti-Asian racism in the past year.

Chef Jannell Lo of Kitchener told CBC Kitchener-Waterloo food columnist Andrew Coppolino in February that COVID-19 has had a big impact on Chinese food restaurants.

"Something that I'm trying to raise awareness for at the moment is anti-Asian racism and violence that is happening all over and the cases keep rising," she said.

"A lot of people are just avoiding Chinese restaurants because of whatever ideas they have that we have caused COVID to happen, but [the restaurants] need support at the moment."

On Friday, regional Chair Karen Redman said during a COVID-19 media briefing that officials have seen a rise in anti-Asian racism in the region in the past few months and called racist rhetoric "incredibly damaging." The comments came after a white gunman killed eight people in Atlanta, including six Asian women, on Tuesday.

Waterloo MP Bardish Chagger, who is also the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, tweeted about an "unsettling rise of anti-Asian racism" in Canada.

"As a society, it's our collective duty to build communities where everyone feels safe by fighting stigma and racism and denouncing all forms of anti-Asian racism," Chagger wrote.

Liu said T&T Supermarket is well-known in the Asian community within the region, but in recent months, they are seeing more diverse customers coming through the doors. 

"After the whole year, we're really lucky to say, we're having more and more non-Asian-based customers enter our store and people feel more safe," he said, adding employees also feel safe and they feel proud to help feed the community.

"We received lots of positive feedback to encourage us to keep doing the right things."

Listen to the interview from The Morning Edition: