PEST CONTROL FOR RETAIL STORES.

A retailer sees pests twice: as a customer-experience problem on the sales floor and as a loss problem in the stockroom. Gnawed packaging, stained fabric and contaminated stock cannot be sold, and one sighting in front of a customer can cost trust that is hard to recover.

We start at the back of the store, where deliveries arrive and cartons are stacked, then work toward the front. Methods keep treated areas away from merchandise and the public, and visits are timed so they happen before opening, after closing or during quiet periods.

Many New York storefronts sit in mixed-use buildings with apartments above and a shared cellar below. Sidewalk cellar doors, coal chutes that were sealed decades ago, pipe penetrations through the cellar ceiling and gaps where the storefront meets the sidewalk all give mice and rats a way in. Stockrooms in those cellars, with cartons stacked against old masonry walls, are often where activity starts.

We inspect the cellar and the storefront line as carefully as the sales floor: door sweeps and thresholds, the sidewalk door frame and gasket, gaps around conduits and sprinkler pipes, and the space behind shelving where stock touches the wall. Where a basement is shared with another tenant or the building, we note what belongs to whom so the landlord and the store can each close their part.