Movie Mill offers comfort food during shutdown
By Yoos, Cam on March 30, 2020.
Greg Bobinec
Lethbridge Herald
As Lethbridge works at crushing the spread of COVID-19 by staying isolated at home, a local business is helping curb the lonely feelings with a community favourite comfort food.
For the last two weeks, The Movie Mill has been offering the community bags of their popcorn for families to enjoy while at home watching films. Movie Mill has closed their facility, but has been making curb-side deliveries to fans of their buttery snack.
“Within days of closing our doors, I turned to what can we do to try and keep the lights on and we had numerous requests from our customers for our popcorn so we put two-and-two together and planned how we can do this while avoiding contact,” says Leonard Binning, owner.
“We do it all e-transfer and strictly curb-side pickup, and we have been doing it every Saturday for the last two weeks.”
Closing their building, while maintaining social distancing and high hygiene standards, Binning says they believe they are following the provincial closure of non-essential services, as they are not operating their facility and allowing people in and practising social distancing in their sales.
“As a non-essential, I’d like to believe as long as we are doing online and curb-side, that we fall within the parameter,” says Binning. “Our doors have been closed, the facility is closed, but we are still doing sales with the curb-side pickup.”
The popcorn sales have been a popular service throughout the community as a couple hundred orders have been filled each week. Occasionally, Movie Mill will also offer items such as cotton candy and their selection of sealed candies, and during the week they offer another local business to offer their popcorn if supplies are available.
“We have had a couple of hundred each week and we have actually had to cut it off at some point because I don’t have unlimited supply or staffing and we certainly want the product to be fresh,” says Binning. “What we do is during the week, we are providing Luigi’s northside with a quantity of our popcorn if available there, but we are doing it every Saturday.”
Over the last couple weeks, Binning says the popcorn sales have been overwhelming but he is grateful for the community support in this difficult time.
“The response has been overwhelming,” says Binning. “The community has been grateful, there are repeat customers and it’s overall been very positive.”
Movie Mill Lethbridge will continue to provide popcorn and other snacks to the community while supplies last, and they encourage social distancing and proper hygiene. Orders are only available when announced on their Facebook page, and number of orders are limited to supplies.
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