PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Starting Wednesday morning, Reading Terminal Market will have a new general manager.
Conor Murphy is from Ireland and is the son of shopkeepers of a “multi-generational family business."
He moved to Philadelphia in 2014 to work in the coffee business, but before that, he worked in Haiti, where he experienced the Port-au-Prince earthquake as well as several hurricanes.
"I've had previous experience working in emergency response,” he said.
There are lessons he's bringing with him as he begins his new job at Philadelphia's iconic indoor market, and with conventions being canceled and large gatherings prohibited, he thinks about the future of the market as he's just beginning his job.
"What does the Fourth of July look like, what does Labor Day look like, what does later in the year look like?" he said.
Murphy said the market has fast-tracked some of their initiatives, most notably, their digital presence through the Mercato delivery app.
Orders have leveled out at about 4,000 to 5,000 a day, and they seem to be rebounding from the initial stay-at-home order that significantly slowed down business in mid-March.
"Because we now have more merchants open for business and because more merchants are coming online, there is still a very high capacity of online orders. But in terms of the ability of getting those orders out, there's now a much more streamlined system internally to manage those orders,” he said.
Murphy's biggest concern is safety.
"The challenge of as more and more guidelines start to come down on food safety and accessibility, how do we move to put those in place as quickly as possible,” he explained.
And while things are certainly different right now, he's pretty optimistic about the future of the market and the regional merchants who work there.
"You know people are baking more at home. People are thinking a lot more deeply about where their food is coming from,” he said.