Catoro COVID-19 Update
March 19, 2020
Despite our efforts to adjust the business and fundraise, Vancouver City Council has just declared a state of emergency and ordered all Vancouver restaurants and bars to shut down operations, unless they can provide a takeout or delivery service.
What this means for Catoro is that effective immediately, we will no longer have the cafe or cat rooms open. For the rest of today, we will still serve drinks for takeout, but beyond this we have decided that it is not in our business’s best financial interest to make drinks for the limited number of orders that may come through.
As we have seen from many articles in the news as of recently, the best and most effective method of suppressing the COVID-19 virus is by social distancing and isolation. With the maximum amount of measure being put into place, this will take a minimum of 3 months to get the virus under control. A vaccine is just being tested now and it is said to need at least 14-18 months before it is ready to be released to the public. Until this vaccine is ready, if we ease up on the precautions we’re taking, the virus will spread again at the same rate.
This is a shock for most of us and we will soon need to adapt to a new way of living in our day to day lives. We know that many of you have already suffered losses with work and investments if not with other aspects of your lives. We empathize with you and hope you can all be strong through these times.
So, what is Catoro going to do? We will pivot and adapt, something that we’ve become accustomed to doing multiple times since opening.
Our new focus in the foreseeable future will be investing our time and efforts into building a robust, user friendly, and ultra accessible online pet supply delivery service. We will be bringing in more products and brands, based on the feedback that we’ve received in the previous few months from the Catoro Cares surveys. We might even venture into offering dog products soon! Our store will remain open for pet supplies with limited hours until further notice.
In order to help this new venture succeed, and for us to keep caring for our cats and rescuing those that we can, our goal will be to get up to 200 Paw Pass Subscribers. If we can manage to get 7 or more sign ups per day, and each of you support us by getting cat food, litter, or other supplies to the equivalent of $100 or more each month, then this will work. We have always tried to be honest with all of you and not sugar coat the realities we face. We hope you understand and can help us achieve our goal. Our Paw Pass service is still new but so far we’re getting really good feedback from it! It’s $8.95 per month with the first 30 days being free, and if you sign up and make your first order before March 31st, we’re offering 25% cash back. After this time, it will always be 10% cash back. We are still open to suggestions as we tweak this and make the system better and better. All of the money you spend at Catoro goes back to cat care and enables us to keep doing what we love to do. Paw Pass info here!
The next big change we will begin is doing virtual adoption interviews. With the free time our staff will have at the store now, we look forward to bringing you more fun and engaging daily content on all existing and new platforms including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok and more! We will do cat features each day so you can really get to know our kitties and hopefully it can be the next best thing to come in for your animal therapy. We will also improve our YouTube livestream to feature more playtime throughout the day. We’re really excited for this. Adoption interviews will happen over video call and once everything is approved, we will have specific adoption days or potentially offer adoption drop offs.
That’s all that we have for now. We know a lot of you will be sitting at home in isolation right now, so please tune in to Catoro’s channels in the upcoming days and see what we’re doing.
Any support you can give us to our GoFundMe to keep us in business is deeply appreciated. And if you can sign up for our Paw Pass if you have a cat or know someone who does, now is the best time to give us a try since many of you probably don’t want to be outside while practicing social distancing. If you have any questions for us about anything, please let us know here or email bookings@catorocafe.com. Thank you for your support Vancity Catorians! We love you and hope we can still serve you to the best of our capacity!
Nathan & the Catoro Team
Our GoFundMe link is here —> https://bit.ly/2WsTvdZ
