Almost every business is affected by the Covid-19 pandemic but in Unlock 2, many had anticipated that the situation will improve and the businesses will revive gradually.
However, this has not come true yet for most of the operators of the sweet shops in Dehradun as most of them state that presently, all are facing financial crises so buying sweets is not on everybody's list. "Earlier, we used to keep our shops closed on Sunday but now we do not even close our shop for the lunch break. Sweets are perishable items and the combination of fewer sales with the hot summer days decreases their shelf life," said a Sahastradhara Road sweet shopkeeper, Anand Muyal. Talking about sweets getting spoiled in summers, a local shopkeeper Rajat Sharma said,
"We have thrown about five kilogrammes sweets just last week. Some days are good for business and some days are quite bad but still, we cannot sit at our homes shutting down our shops. But it is surely better than the lockdown period when we were not earning anything." According to some sweet shops owners, the big sweet shops are doing better business than smaller sweet shops because they have more resources and help to cope during the crisis.
However, they also added that they are taking all the preventive measures in their shops to avoid Covid-19 contagion among people.
Meanwhile, some owners of big chains of sweet shops said that their business is doing better in Unlock 2 than the last month. According to the managing director of Anandam Group, Sumit Khandelwal, their business has increased from 30 per cent to 35 per cent than the last month.
He said that it will take some time for customers to come out and do any kind of purchasing in the market but it might get better with time. On the question of whether the sale of sweets will increase in the coming months due to approaching festivals, Khandelwal said that one cannot predict such things whether the business will increase or not but one can be optimistic about it. He said that several people came to buy sweets when the board results were recently announced and the business was quite well than the usual days too, so one can only hope for the best considering the current crisis.