One too many shutdowns
My wife and I broke down and finally purchased a new bed for ourselves over at Taft furniture. I like Taft because they have some quality stuff and they allow me to do zero percent financing if I pay it off in a year; which I always do.
A new bed meant we needed new sheets, which meant a trip to Macy’s in Colonie Center. It would be our first visit to Macy’s since March when the pandemic turned all of our lives into a cross between E.R. and a Lifetime movie. The sales, I must say, are pretty phenomenal right now and why wouldn’t they be? Not too many people are shopping lately and if they are it is often online.
Brick and mortar stores are so happy to see someone with a pulse; they are offering sweet deals on just about everything right now.
Walking into themall I ran into a friend of mine. I won’t tell you who he is out of respect for his privacy but he looked like Ebenezer Scrooge after the third ghost of the night finishes their visit. By that I mean tired and ashen, with a look of despair in his normally bright eyes.
This friend owns half- dozen stores in the greater Capital Region. Again, I won’t go into what kind of stores for the sake of his privacy but I could see in his face before he spoke his lifetime of work was in trouble.
“How are you doing through all of this?” I asked him. His response was, “Have you got a minute?”
We stepped out of the foot traffic and he told me when you have six of anything you usually have two that are doing really well, two doing okay and two that are always having issues. I’m convinced this applies to a business, pets or even kids. Of course , with kids they change positions from year to year, with the one who is on top of the world crashing down after a bad breakup of some other drama.
But … back to my friend. He told me when the shutdowns started in March he assumed, like most of us, this might be a couple of weeks ormaybe a month tops. By summer, most of us were certain we’d have this virus sorted out or contained.
My how naïve we all were. My pal told me by July he knew two of his six stores were doomed and would not survive this. By September he knew four of the six were probably finished. And now, the week of Thanksgiving and heading into the busiest shopping season of the year? Well, he told me his two top performing stores were also in quicksand and not likely to pull out of this.
I understand the need to stop the virus and at least early on I understood the necessity of the lockdowns. I’m just wondering, with the utmost sincerity, if the cure isn’t becoming worse than the disease.
I’m not writing this column to slap around the Governor or President, God knows the peanut gallery on Twitter has that job filled with room to spare. I’m just pointing out that most small businesses operate on very tight margins and if they had any slack in the line they used it all up getting this far. One more hard shutdown and we may see half our stores closing up and having clearance sales.
That’s not me being overly dramatic, that’s me being honest.
well-known restaurant owner in Albany posted a photo the other day of his dining room at six o’clock on a Friday night and it was 80% empty. There is no way he’ll make it until spring if this continues. My wife saw his post and asked softly, “What will he do if that place closes?”
I could only say, “I have no clue, that’s all he knows how to do.”
As we head into the next three weeks before Christmas, I wanted to make a personal appeal to look around your own community for every small business owner who is hanging on by a thread. If ever there was a time to “shop local” it is this December. The chain restaurants and stores come and go but the places being run by your neighbors are drowning in plain sight.
I’m going to try to focus most of my gift card buying on local stores and restaurants. Example? If you were going to buy someone a new baseball glove, why not a gift card to a place like Play it Again Sports in Latham? Need something pretty for a loved one? Why not a local gift shop or florist? You get my point.
Itmay not sound like much but if just fifty people decided to shop local in a specific store, those sales as we close out 2020, just might be enough to keep their doors
open and be around when this virus is behind us.
For years we have knocked on the doors of local stores and restaurants asking for donations for our raffles and sports teams, and more often than not they have helped. It seems to me that now is
the time to return the favor.
Let’s make 2020 not the year of COVID but the year we helped one another.
John Gray is a news anchor on WXXA-Fox TV 23 and ABC’S WTEN News Channel 10. His column is published every Sunday. Email him at johngray@ fox23news.com.