Partner Facility Solutions
Retail stores see the highest traffic of the year during the holiday season. Retail stores always dedicate extra time and staff to maintaining the cleanliness and orderliness of the store during the holiday season, and in recent years COVID-19 has made everyone rethink how they do their holiday shopping and how stores conduct their cleaning. Taking all necessary precautions by cleaning and sanitizing regularly will boost the health and safety of your employees and customers. This will ensure you have employees to staff the store and customers to shop in it throughout the holiday season. Here are some of our best sanitizing tips for retail stores.
Retail stores see hundreds of customers in and out of their doors every day during the holiday season. Christmas starts earlier than ever in the retail industry now, and stores must be ready to meet the messes and cleanup that is required head on. Maintaining messes and issues before they get a chance to stain or build up is the key to successful results. It is always easier to clean up a mess then and there before it has time to get worse. Prevention is key to maintaining a safe work environment and a positive customer experience. This can be done using frequent, routine surface cleaning with a general disinfectant. Frequent surface cleaning throughout the day is incredibly important when it comes to sanitizing retail stores successfully. We recommend cleaning any high traffic areas, or areas where there is likely to be a higher chance of germs or mess. Some of the key areas to cover while sanitizing retail stores daily include:
These are amongst some of the highest trafficked areas of any given retail store, and conducting routine cleaning will prevent messes and buildup before they get out of hand. Routine cleaning throughout the day will also stop the transmission of bacteria or viruses from getting out of hand, improving the safety of employees and customers.
Knowing how often to routinely surface clean throughout the day can be tricky, and it really boils down to your hours of operation, what you sell, and your facility layout. We suggest conducting a round of surface cleaning every 2-3 hours to stay caught up. This is often enough to be effective, without disrupting retail operations and customers’ shopping experience. Keep reading for more of the best sanitizing tips for retail stores!
Aside from routine cleaning throughout the day, you should include more in-depth sanitizing tasks in the beginning of the day before you open or the end of the day after you close. Some of these tasks can include spot mopping the sales floor, deep cleaning fitting rooms, cleaning windows, dusting the merchandise and displays, and more. These are some of the more disruptive sanitizing and cleaning tasks, so conducting them when there are no customers is often wise. This allows the displays to be moved and adjusted as needed to get the job done, without hurting sales or getting in customers’ way. Having more time to sanitize your retail store also means you can do tasks that take more time like mopping, which requires the floors to dry for an extended period before they can be walked on. You can also switch off which deep cleaning tasks you do each day with a schedule so you can ensure everything is done regularly.
Pairing routine surface cleaning with frequent after-hours deeper cleaning will keep your retail store in top shape all holiday season. You cannot choose one or the other, they complement one another perfectly and help ensure that every corner, shelf, door handle, and countertop gets covered. Deep cleaning is what combats the strongest germs and buildup, which is why daily surface cleaning is not enough on its own.
Getting the most out of these sanitizing tips for retail stores during the holiday season is straightforward. You should be doing routine surface cleaning throughout the day every 2-3 hours, as well as deeper cleaning after-hours. Depending on your store’s hours of operation and shipment schedules it may be easier for you to deep clean before you open or after you close, but either way you should be conducting some deeper cleaning each day as well. Having a designated schedule and task list is important to ensuring you complete cleaning successfully as needed, especially when it comes to retail stores with multiple different managers and random employee schedules. Hiring a professional cleaning company to manage your retail store sanitizing and cleaning can also streamline the process, making it far easier for you to focus on driving sales and helping customers during the busiest time of year.
With over 30 years of combined experience in owners, Partner Facility Solutions has come together to create a company model that believes superior quality service can’t be compromised. Extensive training with intelligent supervision and ownership helps us keep a clear vision of our goals and commitment. Give us a call today for a free consultation and let us be the solution for your facility’s needs. We look forward to forming a partnership with you.
