Scraping Up the Tape

Four years ago (March 23, 2020) the Covid-19 pandemic became a real impact upon my business, as a no-indoor dining mandate went into effect.  While we were all aware it would have many painful and negative impacts, we also recognized the necessity of taking precautions while we learned to manage this new health crisis we were experiencing.  Fear and anxiety about the unknowns as well as the mounting numbers of real deaths weighed heavily at the start.  A support net was hastily built out and often stretched very thinly.  Some businesses fell through, many adapted and "pivoted" while others dug in deep to survive in any way we could.

Last week, as I scraped off the blue tape that I had lain down in March 2020 to mark out our social distancing, I thought about the lessons that will remain, much like the residue of the tape on the floor.    Some of these were improvements while others are still painful reminders that as a society we were not (and perhaps are still not) prepared to care for the most vulnerable, or to put the general welfare of all people above our own selfish interests and needs.

One of the first actions we took at the cafe was to identify all the high-touch and close-contact points in the shop.  These were places where there was most likely some chance of customer and staff virus sharing happening.  At the very beginning, as we wondered about how highly contagious this might virus might be, we removed all the contact points and set up better processes for cleaning the contact areas.  The blue tape markings for social distancing were a reminder of how often we are in close contact with each other, it's just part of who we are and how we run the business.

As we have come out on the other side, these cleaning and sanitizing efforts have stuck with us, which gives me a more confident feeling about providing a safe place to work and to gather.  Perhaps we didn't take it as seriously before, or at least, hadn't had the personal experiences to give us a solid base to draw from to know why we were making the effort to clean well.   This also carried over into recognizing other areas of caring for our health and being willing to mask for each other to protect someone else when we weren't feeling well is a positive outcome for us all.

Although the cafe always had a mix of dine in and take out options, the pandemic created better ways to provide take out and helped us settle into offering an option for delivery.  Before the days of no-indoor dining, I looked at delivery as an unnecessary convenience, but then during the days of isolation, as I put delivery services into use for my own needs, I began to understand that there are times when delivery isn't just a convenience - it's necessary.  We went through five different delivery methods with much frustration prior to and during the early days of the pandemic, but in the end now have something that suits us well and (mostly) is manageable with our sort of complicated cafe/bakery/kitchen menu mix.  Even so, efforts to cap delivery fees were a necessary legislative action to assure small restaurants like mine weren't being taken advantage of.

Building out an online ordering system was also part of my panic at the start of the pandemic, which now seems to have settled into the "how things work" for restaurants.  Our days of isolation, of home-officing, and of going virtual for meetings have created a new normal around use of online platforms for staying in contact with each other.  Having a presence online, a social media team, and accepting the loss of business that happened as people stopped meeting in person in public spaces all played into a new "business model" for the cafe that needed accept a lower traffic and revenue base.   

Reducing my expectations for overall business activity required a lot of effort to streamline staffing levels. Staffing for restaurants is always the highest expense, and for places like mine where production from scratch happens on site for nearly all of our menu items, payroll is even higher.   During the early days of the pandemic, we dropped from 21 staff to 12.  Nearly all of these reductions were from our front counter staff, since we had few customers to serve indoors and we were only taking online and call-in orders that were being set up for pick up.  Many of the young people who were balancing school with part-time employment, or who were juggling three or four small part-time jobs to make ends meet, cut back sharply.  They found better balance for themselves, and in the process, helped me to consider my own work-life balance. 

Dropping Sundays was an easy early decision in the pandemic since the churches who had been our "after-worship brunch crowd" were all closed to in-person activity.  Moving from seven days a week to six, gave me personally, a new pace that actually found me with down time each week.  Before that, my crazed work-'til-I-drop mentality was pushing my limits.  The added bonus of being able to reconnect more deeply with my faith community, gave me additional support during those very stressful early months, when business survival was not assured.   Now that I've moved into the Sundays off mode, I really can't imagine going back to working seven day stretches continuously.  

Unfortunately, coming out the pandemic with an overall lower base of customer activity (about 20% below) has meant also needing to thin my staffing to a much lower base level.  And this has fallen on me heavily to be the additional back up and fill in and coverage to keep a skeleton crew in place.  Over the first 14 years of operation, I had developed a pretty stable method for determining staffing levels based on customer traffic patterns but these last four years have tossed all calculations out the window. New patterns are still in process and new expectations around working have led me to rethink my scheduling here nearly monthly. Through all of this, our cafe has still managed to keep a core crew of ten of the twelve who were here at the start of the pandemic.  This is a base that I am very grateful for, especially knowing that many restaurant owners went through a start-from-scratch rehiring after the pandemic's indoor dining restrictions were lifted.

In the midst of all of this, efforts to increase the minimum wage and to provide a base level of support for health-related leave times and a state-wide earned sick time policy were at work.  I made the personal effort to share our experiences and work with legislators to develop sound policy built out of real-life needs.  We can be grateful that a pandemic's lasting impact will be better safety nets for workers, especially those who are in customer service and health service areas.

The lingering residue on the floor for my business will be the added debt.  I felt fortunate to access a Small Business Administration Economic Injury and Disaster Loan (EIDL) to provide me operating funds during the months when revenue was more than 40% lower than our historical averages.   Government support, especially for businesses like mine that were required to change their business model, was strong at the beginning but dwindled quickly, and then disappeared far before any sense of normality was restored.  And for a place like mine that never fully returned to prior activity, there are no on-going supports.  I am very grateful for the federal, state, county, and city (as well as many private individual gifts) that allowed the business to stay in operation continuously through the pandemic.   I am also still a bit bitter that the grant I was banking on when I took on the EIDL debt, the Restaurant Revitalization Grant, ended up being a first-come, first-served package that went disproportionately to large, investment group restaurants who received millions of dollars, leaving many small independent owners with nothing.

So, I end this pandemic with a large debt I'm trying to keep on deferral, and a growing credit card debt at 20% interest, and the challenging puzzle of reaching a break-even cash flow while chasing inflation and general dis-ease as a society.  I also end this pandemic true to our mission to be a supportive workplace for those with many barriers to employment - a mission that has proved its need and has been taken up by several other cafes.  We have found ways to stay true to our local sourcing, our no-waste goals, and our community investments.   With a drop in our "service hours," we were able to take on a pop-up partner, the Curry Diva, which has been a delightful addition to our overall operations.

And recently, as theater concessions, musicians, and in-person small group gatherings are gradually reappearing, the dark days behind us may slowly fade, much as the residue on the floor of the cafe wash away.  But, may we always remember the journey that those four years took us on, and may we continue to walk the path together.