Small Business Curbside – In Response to Covid-19


In response to COVID 19 and the related devastating financial impact, we have community-sourced this map of small businesses primarily consisting of grocers, restaurants and other business types (such as toy merchants and nursery/garden) that offer no-contact, curbside and/or delivery sales. This map does not included business that require for customers to enter the business property to obtain purchased items. This map may be especially useful for those in age-risk age groups and immuno-compromised individuals. This list is populated by your input.  

Please note that we are making our best effort to provide accurate information at the time and that inputs to this map are a community effort. Due to volume, we are unable to stay informed of changes or closures. We would appreciate any help you can provide in vetting and/or letting us know of changes.

A summary of the criteria:

1. Order and pay online, email or by phone

2. Items are placed in your trunk, curbside or delivered to you (no on-premises pickup)

3. No big box or chain stores

Send us recommendations:

or even better, send us the google maps marker!

Why are we doing this?

Right now – people are getting sick from covid-19, small businesses are struggling, big grocers are flourishing and no one is getting what they want from the store.  Instead of finding a solution, many of us are staying up later to wait for the new time slots to open only to have someone do the shopping for us. This is a suggested solution to help. 

Why can’t I just go to the store?

You can but we ask for you to consider this first –  if 10 people work at a store at a time and 30 people are shopping at that store an hour, then (assuming an 8 hour shift) those 10 people can potentially be exposed to 240 people in a day. On top of that, consider the number of people those 240 people have been exposed to.  (Not based on any actual data. Just math.) 

Why no big-box stores?

Prior to the lock down, our purchases were spread out to support small and big businesses. Since the lock down, many people are now solely relying on big-box stores because they tend to have a greater variety of items at one location and their infrastructure was already set up to support online orders, payment and curbside delivery.  That means that more people are trying to buy the same number of items from fewer stores leading to many inventory shortages (like baking yeast, flour and toilet paper!). Meanwhile, small businesses tend to have inventory but the lack of customers is increasing the chances they will have to fold soon.

How do you distinguish between big box and not big box?

We are doing our best to identify chain stores that are locally owned vs big box but we are working so quickly that sometimes some things will slip by us.  Please let us know if we have made an error, so that we can correct it.

Why is putting items in the trunk preferred?  

The employee has already touched the bags and can go wash hands readily (or are wearing gloves).  If they place the item on the sidewalk, you have to grab the bags yourself with potential to contaminate your car and everything you touch up to the point of getting home. Curbside and at home delivery are also ok.  

Why no 3rd party service providers?

While using a 3rd party service provider may be unavoidable at times, they are not technically helping to flatten the curve. Third party services go to the store for you and drop off groceries at your home. While you might not risk exposure, that still exposes everyone at the store to an additional person (your shopper). Given that it’s so difficult to get a time slot,  consider how many additional people are at the stores now throughout the day. There is no way to know if store employees are immuno-compromised or have at-risk family members.   

What about delivery and restaurants?

We have been adding them to the map if people suggest them but due to volume have not openly asked for these types of businesses. We recognize that there are other maps out there that offer such information and will focus this map on no-contact curbside and delivery only. The main issue we are seeing is that often restaurants require for customers to go into the restaurant to pick up and pay.  Doing so exposes restaurant employees to every customer who walks through the door and vice versa. That is why many are currently classified as Unconfirmed on the map.  

What does (Unconfirmed) mean?

We add all recommendations to the map if they can be reasonably vetted online. They will continue to be classified as “Unconfirmed” though until we are able to confirm the process with the business.  

How can you help?

If you have a favorite small business, please call or email to ask if they can fill orders using this process.  Any vetting done prior to reaching us is one less business we have to vet ourselves. Our goal is to provide the most accurate information as possible but obviously there are no guarantees.

Ask your friends and family for input even if they are not in Seattle.  We are not setting location limits. 


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Keeping The Kids Busy

This is a cross-post from Teacher Tom’s blog. You can see the original post here.


Last week, I found a pair of our three-year-olds holed up under our loft, surrounded by stuffed animals, cracking one another up with rhymes.

“Bunny wunny!”

“Teddy beddy!”

“Doggie joggy!”

It was a silly, almost wild game, one punctuated by breathless laughter and the occasional animal throwing.

One of the most pernicious of our societal misconceptions is the one that suggests that if adults don’t play a hand in keeping children busy, then they will, at best, waste their time, and to your average adult this game was a classic waste of time. They aren’t even using real words for crying out loud!

As a human with well over half-a-century under his belt, I know that the only waste of time is the time spent doing meaningless, joyless tasks at the behest of others. And as a teacher, I know that children, when left to their own devices, invariably play in ways that are, to them, both purposeful and meaningful. These kinds of rhyming games, for instance, are a way of playing with language, exploring it, delighting in it. Experts say that this sort of thing is a building block of future literacy. I can see how this would be true, but I almost hate mentioning it because I know that there are some, influenced by the cult of keeping-the-kids-busy, who will take this information and ruin everything by trying to “extend” it or “scaffold” it, by creating rhyming worksheets or computer games, or to in some other way take it over with the idea of rendering it “educational.”

With the holidays upon us, there will be a temptation to “keep the kids busy” while they’re out of school, to look for ways to make things educational or productive or at least not a waste of time, but it’s a temptation worth fighting. We all need more time to be bored, to be silly, to play. The kids are alright without us adults always butting in: they aren’t wasting their time, indeed, they are using it for it’s highest purpose . . . burpose, murpose, turpose.

“It Will Fall”

This post is cross posted from Teacher Tom’s blog. See the original post.


There are a couple boys in our 3’s class who still struggle with the temptation to knock down the constructions of others, so I was loudly narrating my own activity by way of making sure they knew that this tower was “my tower” and it was not a “knocking down tower.” Naturally, this drew something of crowd.

I announced, “I’m going to build my tower all the way to the ceiling.”

“It will fall,” declared one of the onlookers.

“Yes, it will fall,” agreed another.

They weren’t taunting me, but rather simply stating a fact. Every preschooler knows that there is a limit to how tall she can build a block tower, and if she doesn’t yet know, she soon will. She knows that there is a height limit imposed either by physics, her own capabilities, or the designs of others. Indeed, she knows that this is the destiny of everything she builds with her playthings. And she knows that this doesn’t just go for her, but for everyone. It’s part of the human condition.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she won’t continue to try to stack blocks to the ceiling or the sky or to outer space. On the contrary, for many of us, that’s exactly the point, to challenge ourselves, to see how far we can go before it all comes crashing down. We learn quite young to not cry when our buildings fall, unless it comes at the hands of others like the boys who are still tempted (which is why I was working to “teach” the lesson of “not knocking down”). In fact, for most of them, most of the time, the response is to laugh, often giddily, sometimes even wildly. Many, once they’ve recognized the inevitable bending back toward the earth are even eager to help it along, giving it an extra push.

As an adult it’s impossible to not see this as a metaphor for all human activity: everything we build will fall. We may someday build that tower to the ceiling or to the sky or into outer space, but in time we still know even that will fall.

As predicted, my tower did fall. I had genuinely tried to make to the ceiling, putting my best efforts into it. The taller I built it, the more children gathered around. They knew it would fall, but they were with me, not exactly cheering, but anticipating. Maybe this time the tower wouldn’t fall. And when it did, we laughed, several of them rushing it to get a piece of its demise. Then all around me new towers began to rise in imitation of my attempt, each one a tower “to the ceiling.”

“This Is The Best World We Ever Made!”

This is a cross-post from Teacher Tom’s Blog. See the original post.


“I’m that one,” said one of the girls, pointing at a fairy.

“Okay,” answered the other, “Then I’ll be that one.”

When I didn’t say anything, I was invited, “Which one are you, Teacher Tom?” I picked one to be “me.”

“And this is my pet,” the first girl said, pointing to one of the unicorns. Her friend picked out one of the butterflies to be her pet, while I opted for a ladybug.

“Where do we sleep?”

“In the castle, silly.”

“Oh, right,” then bending over the puzzle, she pointed to one of the windows on the distant castle, “That’s my bedroom.” So we each selected our bedrooms.

“You’re room is right next to mine, Teacher Tom!”

“And mine is right above yours!”

“We can have a castle sleepover!”

“I’m just going to dive right into our land.” She pretended to plunge into the picture.

“Me too!”

Then in mock panic, “But how do we get back out? How will we get back to our real homes?”

“We just say the magic word . . . Flower!”



“We’re back home again.”

As we played at diving into our magic world, another girl approached, using the language of a master player, “I want to play too.”

“Sure, we’re just diving into our kingdom”

“But first you have to pick a fairy.” The newcomer picked her fairy.

“Then you have to pick a pet.” She picked a unicorn.

“Then you have to pick your bedroom.” When she did, the others gushed, “You’re right beside me for the castle sleepover! We’re going to have movie night!”

“Let’s dive in!” and we all dove in.

We wove a story together about our magic world, forgetting that we were all fairies, switching our identities to princesses and queens. I was assigned, “The old grandpa king.” I was told, “You have to be jolly.”


“But, how to we know if it’s night or day? This puzzle has a sunshine and this other one is nighttime.” After a moment of study, we decided that the nighttime puzzle was where we slept and the daytime puzzle was where we played.

There was one more puzzle on the floor. This one was Halloween themed. “Let’s make that one too. Then we’ll have day and night and Halloween!” By the time we had pushed the third puzzle over to become part of our story, we had been at it for the better part of an hour.


We watched our classmates playing in this place we had created together. Then one of the girls said, “This is the best world we’ve ever made!” and her friends agreed.