Name: Gemma Thompson

Business name: Gemma’s Convenience Store

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday from 5.30am until 8pm

When did you open your business and why?

I’ve been here for three years and three quarters – we’ll have been here four years when it gets to July.

My step-dad used to work here and the business was put up for sale so I decided to buy it.

It’s been in the family for a while – my family members have had shops before and I’ve worked there with them, but until moving here I had never had my own shop.

Why in this location?

I’m originally from down south near Brighton, and we had family that moved up north towards the Lake District, so Oswestry was in a good location to stay close to them really. We’re kind of in the middle of where our family live up north and down south.

I love living in Oswestry. Being from Brighton originally which was quite a busy city, Oswestry seems so chilled out and laid back, it’s great.

All the people here are lovely too.

Tell us about your business

At THE moment, with the virus ongoing, we’re offering home delivery.

We have 14 paper rounds that go out to people living around here every morning, and we deliver those to around 300 customers. With the papers, we have been sending out leaflets showing what we sell and telling them we are offering free home delivery on groceries for those who are self-isolating. We deliver, for free, seven-days-a-week and tend to get between 10 to 15 orders a day for that.

As far as what we sell is concerned, we’re like a mini-supermarket, we sell a wide variety of things and we have a wider range of things for sale currently due to demand from customers.

We have five members of staff and they are amazing, they’ve been great – especially Sandra who has worked here for more than 40 years.

We’ve grown to know a lot of customers as really good friends because we see them so often.

What is your proudest moment?

Helping the community out during this crisis has been something we’ve all been quite proud of being able to do. We have a lot of customers who come here regularly who might be scared to go out at the moment, so being able to look after them is good – we safely have a conversation with those we drop things off for too, so it’s not just getting them food and things, it’s the social aspect too.

It really is nice to be able to do, I’m just glad we can help – the delivery is a service we hope to carry on after all of this.

When we had the shop re-fitted was nice too.

Any strange requests?

We HAVEN’T had too many to be honest – one customer asked for canned water once which was rather odd, but not many others I can remember.