Toronto’s medical officer of health is urging all restaurants and bars to offer takeout and delivery only, as of midnight tonight, and for nightclubs, movie theatres and concert venues to close temporarily, to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
If businesses do not comply with her recommendations, she said they could be subject to orders under Section 22 of the Health Protection and Promotion Act.
For further information, please see the CBC online article we referenced for this email.
More suggestions from other Toronto BIAs
As this situation continues to broaden in scope, I know many of you are coming up with creative solutions to keep business coming in, which has been great to see.
Here are some further ideas:
- Offering discount/incentives with gift card purchase ($20 gift card value for $15 spend, gift cards offered at a discount such as 20% off, etc.)
- Offering free local delivery
- Accepting orders over the phone
- Packing up online/phone orders and bringing them out to customer’s cars
- Increasing your take-out/delivery options
- Adjusting your business’s opening hours to better allocate resources towards delivery options
- Waiving fees for appointment rescheduling
- Encouraging customers to pay by card (instead of cash)
If you have a COVID-19 related update for your business that you would like for the BIA to share more broadly on our social media channels, please tag us so that I can see it and share more readily. We’re updating our social channels much more rapidly so please check those below to be updated first.