Small businesses suffering in NWI
Grindhouse Café owner Gabe Mauch has figured out at least one thing during the year the nation shut down.
Ever one for cheeky marketing, Mauch has a plan up his sleeve to respond to those who keep asking when he’ll finally reopen his doors and welcome indoor dining again. In this case, the plan up his sleeve will find its way on to his sleeve — his coffee cup sleeve, that is.
“When I get them reprinted, they’re going to say, ‘Grindhouse Café: No, we don’t know when we’re opening the dining room yet,’” he deadpanned to the delight of his employees, one of whom was tearing up a pork slab into pulled pork while another crafted a large latte flavored with homemade Irish Crème.
The 100 block of Broad Street in Griffith — a town that saw five of its businesses as well as its Town Hall close temporarily for deep cleaning after the COVID-19 virus infiltrated their barriers and got several people sick in October — represents the whole range of scenarios a year kneecapped by a worldwide pandemic could see.
On one end of the block is Grindhouse, which put up its chairs and closed to indoor patrons March 13; on the other is the now-defunct Twincade, which closed its doors December under the weight of being an eventspecific place despite receiving $30,000 in PPP money.
“We were quite apprehensive to reopen because of the nature of our business; it’s all celebratory and there are video games where you know people touch everything all the time,” former owner Patricia Sidener said in December of the state lifting the quarantine last May. “Our whole marketing idea is parties, it’s events. On Friday night, Saturday night, we’re packed with birthday parties nonstop, and then all of a sudden, we don’t have these events going on.”
Blythe’s Sporting Goods, meanwhile, saw lines out the door of people purchasing firearms and ammunition for much of the summer due to civil unrest after Minneapolis Police killed George Floyd in May.
The pandemic shutdown bludgeoned Indiana from the start, sending its unemployment rate to a stratospheric 16.9% in April, up from a mere 3.2% in March, according to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development’s website. May and June’s numbers remained remarkably high — at 12.3% and 11.2%, respectively — but dropped considerably in July, to 7.8%, coinciding with Gov. Eric Holcomb kicking the state into Stage 4.5 of his “Back on Track” plan for reopening.
Despite Indiana’s COVID-19 infection rates skyrocketing from November through January, the state’s unemployment numbers continued to fall, even as the state tightened and loosened its restrictions as positive COVID cases rose and fell. By December, unemployment had fallen to 4.3%, compared with 3.1% at the start of the year, according to the Department of Workforce Development.
Northwest Indiana really took it on the chin in those early days, clocking in at 19.6% unemployment, said Micah Pollak, Indiana University Northwest’s Director of the Center for Economic Education & Research and Associate Professor of Economics, in his 2021 forecast for the Indiana Business Journal. The region shed almost 30,000 jobs that month, or 10.7% of its entire employment, he said, and while the state did recover quickly, “the full and longer-term economic effect of the crisis on Northwest Indiana’s economy is still mostly unknown,” and won’t be realized until later this year.
“As we reach the end of 2020, as much of the economic recovery that can happen without a longterm solution to the coronavirus pandemic has already happened. The economic recovery necessary to restore pre-pandemic levels of employment and income will likely take until well into 2022 or longer,” Pollak said in his forecast. “How long this recovery takes will depend crucially on how quickly a long-term solution to the virus can be found, most likely in the form of an effective and widespread vaccine.”
Having just signed the lease on a second Grindhouse location in Whiting, Mauch was on top of the world when the coronavirus set up shop in the states. His sister and business partner, Kate Mauch Sheehan, breaking her leg a week after they signed the lease predicted the nightmare to come in a way.
“I feel like I’ve been on constant pivot, constant adjustment since last year, when we started operating under the suspicion that we would have to close,” Mauch said. “When we reopened, we stopped doing sandwiches for a month. Then we got to Stage 4. We brought the food back; you can’t eat it here, but at least you can have a Turkey Dolo.”