Carpe Diem Comics at 101 N. McDonald St., McKinney, had temporarily closed March 25 to follow stay-at-home orders, but it reopened April 24 for curbside pickup. Some of the store’s selection is available online, and people can also call the store at 214-856-4519 to place an order for a specific item not listed there.
“It’s not quite all on the website; we did not do web sales at all before this started,” owner Shado Childs-Wiley said. “We have an online store now. It's pretty amazing. And we've been spending the last month manually entering stuff into it, but it's been a process.”
He said being able to reopen and offer curbside pickup seems to be making a difference, but so far, it is too soon to tell how the business will fare.
With curbside pickup becoming more widely available, the city of McKinney will continue to ensure local businesses are following regulations the same way it has since March, said Frances La Rue, the senior communications and media specialist for the city.
Most McKinney businesses have complied with regulations, she said. She said the few times a problem has arisen, businesses that have had a complaint filed against them are willing to fall in step with regulations.
If anyone is potentially violating an order, complaints can be made to the city’s code services department at 972-547-7400 between 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
While the new guidelines are helpful, Childs-Wiley said the more significant impact will be when the shop is able to reopen to walk-in customers, but he said he and his wife Melyssa's business is not rushing into that.
“We personally are in the high-risk category,” he said. “We’ve got an elderly gentleman who lives at home with us, and my wife and I are both, for various reasons, immunocompromised, so we're in a high-risk category. So we would love to reopen, but we want to be smart. We want everybody to be smart about it.”
