#coronavirus #COVID19 #FlattenTheCurve #businesses #ClosingBusinesses
Nearly 66,000 businesses have folded since March 1, 2020.
So says a headline over a story about small businesses forcing to close because of the coronavirus.
Emily Flitter wrote the story for The New York Times, and it was also published July 19, 2020, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It tells the story of Mick Larkin, who owns a karaoke bar in Wichita Falls, Texas, who, despite doing “everything we were supposed to do,” had to close when Texas shut down all its bars, the article says.
Yelp has been keeping track of the businesses’ fate, the article says.
Small businesses account for 44 percent of all U.S. economic activity, the article quotes the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).
Restaurants, bars and other entertainment, dining and social venues are particularly hard hit. Even in places where they are allowed to open, they can’t have full houses. They must be at a certain percentage of capacity, depending on the state and city they are in. Many cannot survive only partially full – despite any government assistance they may get.
If these venues do not survive, it will mean countless numbers of people out of work – never mind the pleasure of which they may be depriving their former customers.
With those folks out of work, how will they eat? How will they pay rent? How will they maintain their cars so they can look for other work?
Small business in general survives on a shoestring. Even if they have a thriving business, it takes very little to turn things completely bleak. With this pandemic lingering, at least in the United States, those small businesses that are still surviving will have lots of thinking to do. More of them, sadly, will fold.
Even when things get “back to normal,” no one knows what “normal” will look like. If someone wanted to step in to revive a closed business, would that person dare take a chance?
Will a business have to learn to live at 25 percent of 50 percent capacity? Will they have to buy or lease extra space to spread out their clientele? How much would that cost, and how much would they have to raise their prices?
As a diner, or patron, of a business, one may like the idea of being separated from other patrons. Still, there are some venues whose attraction is the ability to meet patrons they may not yet know.
There is good news in all of this. If you work at, or own, a place that is vulnerable in this environment, or has already closed, there are other ways you can make money – potentially more than you would have made in your job or business. They require an open mind, the willingness to be coached and the desire to get more from life than you ever thought you could.
To check out one of the best such programs, message me.
In short, you may have liked the job you had, or the business you owned. Or, it may have owned you, or not paid you enough to get what you wanted from life.
If you have to start your life anew, perhaps doing something completely different may be in order.
It may be best to presume the new “normal” may not suit you as well as the “old” normal. The good news is: you can do something about it if you are open to give it a shot.
Peter