As small businesses await aid, it’s too late for some
Sarah Trubnick is starting to make peace with a gut-wrenching reality: She may never reopen The Barrel Room, her beloved 5-year-old restaurant in San Francisco’s financial district.
The sweeping $900 billion pandemic relief package that Congress has approved contains billions in aid directed specifically at struggling small businesses like Trubnick’s. But even if she gets the $350,000 she figures she needs before the end of January, Trubnick can’t afford to reopen right away.
Her business won’t be viable until her regular customers — office workers who commute into the city and go out for lunch and dinner — return from work-at-home exile. She’s also contending with California’s temporary ban on indoor or outdoor dining.
“We can’t open until the summer, even if we got the thumbs-up,” Trubnick said.
America’s entrepreneurs welcomed the longdelayed relief package, which provides $325 billion in aid to small companies and makes it easier for them to gain access to grants and loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.
But the rescue comes too late for tens of thousands of businesses that have already closed, a consequence of a pandemic that has kept away diners, shoppers and customers since early spring. The National Restaurant Association estimates that 110,000 U.S. restaurants — 17 percent — have shut down indefinitely or for good, doomed by restrictions on their hours or capacity and by Americans’ reluctance to eat out.
“If you closed already, it doesn’t help you a bit,” said Henry Pertman, director of operations at Total Image Creative, a Maryland-based hospitality consulting firm. “We lost a lot of restaurants that didn’t have to go under. They saw no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Many small and independent retailers are also in jeopardy. They typically collect an outsize proportion of their annual revenue during the holiday shopping season. But government restrictions are limiting how many customers can be in a store at one time. Even apart from such restrictions, many consumers are staying home anyway as a precaution against the resurgent virus.
Especially vulnerable are small independent shops, many of which are barely hanging on and will likely close their doors after the holidays — joining more than 8,600 retailers that have already gone out of business this year, according to
market researcher CoreSight.
For them, Congress took too long and probably offered too little relief on top of a $2 trillion rescue package that the government enacted in March but whose benefits had largely expired. That aid package introduced PPP loans, which are meant to help small businesses keep employees on their payrolls.
“We really needed this second round and renewal of the program back in August to help many businesses to get through the last quarter of 2020,” said Karen Kerrigan, president of the advocacy group Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.