College Stores

Trends in College (From page 109) ing was safe.”

Stipp said, “One thing the pandemic forced us to do was be flexible. Navigate and steer your ship on a dime. Create a plan, see if it works, and if it doesn’t work, reevaluate and change. We may have come up with Plan A, but what worked and what we settled on was Plan S. There was a lot of looking at what worked and thinking outside of the box. We also learned we could do more with less.”

Askew and Sivertson agreed the COVID pandemic taught them to be flexible and adaptable, be creative in hard times, and to have backup plans: “We can’t always count on things being the same! We will continue to offer many new items on our website. We will be more conservative when bringing in merchandise for fall. We will continue to be aggressive in promoting our new items and events over social media.”

Now that COVID is on a decline in Bismarck, Sandness said she and her staff are doing an “internal remodel. With everything that’s going on, we want a refresh. We notice things like traffic flow a little more than we did before, so we’re going to do an internal remodel to adjust for good traffic flow and what customers go to. We’ve learned that everything changes. You have to make it work. If someone throws a wrench into things, we have to figure out how to best serve our customers. My small staff—all four—had great ideas, and really made things work. In the end, we’re here to serve the students. What they need is what we try to provide.” ❖