This week, RC and I made a choice that no business owners would ever want to make. We walked through our roastery and retail shop and realized that we could not safely protect the members of our team from a virus that no one knows much about.
Our company is 100% about providing the best customer service that we can along with great products, delicious freshly roasted coffee and wonderful drinks. Not being able to personally provide an extraordinary experience goes against our customer service DNA. Not taking the steps to protect our team, however, would go against our fundamental core value of providing the best service and leadership to our employees.
We decided to temporarily lay off 90% of our staff using the disaster mass layoff available through the TWF. We did it because we couldn’t guarantee our team’s safety and we wanted to make sure that everyone would be paid, receive benefits, and could go home and practice social distancing as we are being told to do.
We are still roasting & shipping coffee M-F
So, now what? The staff that is still working at TCT is busy roasting coffee like crazy right now in order to keep up with the online orders coming in from customers who still want beans and have traded a visit to our shop with a visit from UPS. We plan on continuing to offer this online service for the duration of the “pause” and hope that everyone will stay home and order your favorite coffee through our website at www.texascoffeetraders.com.
There are still some cafes and groceries who are open in new formats that we supply beans to and we will continue to do that, as well.
We miss everyone! We miss our customers, our community, and we miss our team. We are a family (literally) and it is hard to think about not being together to share this time as a group. Hopefully, this distancing and business pause will help stop the growth curve of this horrid illness and soon we can hug again. In the meantime, please continue ordering your favorite coffees - we will roast and ship them right out. Thank you for your loyalty and understanding.
Beth and RC Beall