Waiting For Superman: CV Stories, 22 April 2020

What's it like for a local small business owner right now? This is what it's like.

This newsletter is publishing your quarantine and coronavirus stories every Wednesday. \These are stories from you about how this is affecting you, your family, your friends … your daily life. No story is too small or too big. (The regular weekly newsletter will continue uninterrupted.) Email me your story at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.

We only have one story this week, but I think it’s an important one. Many of you have seen what is happening with our governor down here in Georgia, how he is trying to reopen businesses as early as Friday. (Friday!) Most local businesses, most of which were barely hanging on in the first place, refusing to open, which has led to the odd sensation that comes with realizing that your local tattoo parlor cares more about your health than your government does.

I’ve asked my friend Tim Kelly, who owns The Rook and Pawn here in Athens, to write today about what a nightmare all of this has been for small, locally owned businesses like his, and how the government’s incompetence has led to a surreal comedy of errors worthy of Kafka. And that was before the governor decided to just say “screw it, let’s do it and be legends.” Politicians always talk about the importance of small business, how they’re trying to stick up for the middle-class entrepreneur. But few have been hit harder during all this than them … and it has become increasingly obvious they have absolutely no one in their corner.

Take it away, Tim. And everyone else, please send me your pandemic stories at williamfleitch@yahoo.com

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My wife Carrie, a pediatrician, and I own The Rook and Pawn, a board game cafe here in Athens featuring food, drinks, the best staff in town and over 1,000 card and tabletop games available to play from our quite lovely and Instagram-able Wall of Games. It’s a delightful place, but we worry about its future every day.

If I were to create an exhaustive list of the frustrations, major and petty, that we’ve faced these last six(!!) weeks we’d fill volumes. There have been many unique challenges Carrie and I have faced as restaurant owners. Hark back to that first weekend of March 14, as media reports darkened and sports leagues began shutting down. Businesses were asked to make decisions about remaining open with absolutely no guidance or information from the state and federal government. The decision of whether to keep The Rook and Pawn open would have a long-lasting impact on the viability of the business, the livelihood of our employees and the literal health of our customers. Yet all we knew about the virus was what could be gleaned from CNN and Twitter.

With no directives and no cover from the government, this was a no-win situation for business owners: Close and lose truckloads of money while potentially looking like a fool for overreacting, or stay open and be cast as reckless and dangerous by the many who rightly viewed this threat as very real. As has been the case for the entirety of our marriage, it has been helpful to have a doctor in the house. Carrie recognized much earlier than most that the right-side-of-history call was to close sooner rather than later. Thankfully, our local government stepped in to fill the void much earlier than most by issuing a shelter-in-place ordinance just days later.

Then we had to determine how to best take care of our employees. The state of Georgia made unemployment benefits available to those temporarily out of work, putting the onus on employers to navigate the Department of Labor’s online unemployment portal and file on every employees’ behalf. In a soon-to-be recurring scenario, the seemingly good idea of elected officials was backed up with no practical know-how. Thousands and thousands of business owners swamped the portal, crashing the system and overtaxing all help desks. Multiple calls and emails went unanswered. We had employees at home with no job and no way of knowing if their benefits would ever come.

The next few weeks saw relief by way of the federal government’s $600/week check for the newly unemployed and the Paycheck Protection Program, which purported to provide the needed lifeline for small businesses to make it through the crisis. In the run up to the PPP’s passage, it seemed perfect. Here’s two-and-a-half times your monthly payroll cost, and you don’t have to pay back a dime, provided you bring back all of your employees once this all calms down. Good idea in theory! But in practice? Well, this time it wasn’t an overtaxed login portal but a rollout from the feds to local lenders that included no guidance as to how the process actually worked. Some banks rolled out applications, others never did and before almost anyone had received dime one, it was announced the fund was dry.

But good news! The Rook and Pawn was one of the lucky ones! We got our PPP funding! Then, the full guidance came out on this “forgivable” loan. No longer would it be sufficient to bring your employees back in June: To meet the forgiveness requirements, businesses were now required to bring back all employees the day the funds were deposited in your account. A difficult challenge for any reopening business, much less a business that is required to be effectively closed due to shelter-in-place ordinances. It became clear that actual small businesses, the small businesses that so many of us equate with “small business” (restaurants, coffee shops, hair salons), were never really contemplated at all when the PPP was passed. This program was for the big guys, the law firms, the accounting firms and the Ruth’s Chris of the world. So we now have two federal relief packages -- the PPP, and the $600/week unemployment benefit -- directly at odds with each other. Again, the lack of guidance and leadership was forcing us into an unenviable choice: Ask your employees to risk their health and take less money by returning to work at a closed restaurant, or take on more debt through the Paycheck Protection Program.

On and on it went.

A Chamber of Commerce Save Small Business grant is announced! $5,000 restriction free to keep your place afloat! Apply at 3 p.m. on this day!! Millions flock online to apply, the system crashes again and again, and after an hour the portal cranks back up only for us to receive alerts that the system’s security has been breached and our personally identifiable information may have been acquired by bots.

The SBA announces a disaster relief grant! Grant applied for, confirmation number received. Weeks go by, no word. Call is placed to help desk only to be told “there is no mechanism in place to check the status of your application through your confirmation number or otherwise. Not even if the application has been received at all.” And on and on…

It is now six weeks in. While any global crisis like this will always tax systems and create challenges, surely as a nation we could have been more prepared than this. For small business, it has been nothing short of a train wreck, bordering on total failure.

Which brings us to today. Twenty-four hours ago, since our governor’s decision here in Georgia to go back to business as normal as early as this Friday, we come full circle to that confusing and uncertain weekend in March. One more time, restaurant owners are being asked to make a painful choice: Open your business and risk the lives of your employees and customers or risk the business itself. When we decided to open a place where you could play UNO and drink beer, never in my wildest dreams did I think an elected official would ask us to make the call on who lives and who dies.

The Rook and Pawn did not wait to make the call, Dr. Carrie, the true hero of this story, did not hesitate. Of course we will remain closed until science and the experts have had their say and our local Mayor and Commission (who have been nothing short of amazing through it all) give the all clear. It’s still so unfair to our employees. They are now off unemployment, and thus lose all those relief benefits from the feds, to go back to work in an unsafe environment. If you were one of the majority of small businesses that didn’t get funded in the first wave of PPP, your choice is either: Open, risk your employees health and make no money because no one wants to go out and buy stuff, forcing you to eventually have to close and fire your employees OR don’t open because that’s crazy, but also you can’t bring back your employees so they have to be terminated, and then they have to go through the process of filing unemployment on their own, and then you just hope that you can hire them all back if your business ever opens again.

Hard not to think, as has been posited, that this whole “REOPEN GEORGIA” thing was nothing more than a clear the decks of an overburdened unemployment roll.

So what kind of day is today? Today … it still feels like a good day. Our manager, Collin, is hard at work slinging coffees and making takeout lunches available through a contact-less ordering and payment system Carrie worked so hard to set up. Plans are being made through retail game sales and other avenues to keep things afloat for as long as possible until we can see “normal” on the horizon. Cars are filtering through the driveway of our neighbor, Creature Comforts Brewing, buying hand sanitizer and cold beers to enjoy on sunny spring afternoons. Across the street from us lies the world famous 40 Watt. Its marquee reads “Getting Ready for the Biggest After Party Ever.” Despite the incompetence of those in charge, good people are doing the things needed done to make sure we see the other side of this. It’s good. Through it all, somehow, it remains a good day.

Send me your pandemic stories at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.