This is Part 2 of a series on our look at local churches, businesses, schools and government one year after COVID-19 shut down Sunflower County.
They teased you with appetizers, they welcomed shoulder-to-shoulder shopping but that’s ancient history for most of the retail and restaurant world.
One year into COVID-19 and local retail and restaurant businesses are still working to find the new normal and bring back customers to pre-COVID numbers. Jennifer Roughton Schaumburg of The Crown Restaurant in downtown Indianola is still looking to find the new normal.
“Things are not back to normal, but they feel better than they did last month and the moth before that,” Schaumburg said. “We’re slowly getting back there.”
With her restaurant being part of her retail store, the atmosphere and enticements have been altered.
“We would invite you in with our ‘nibbles’ and taste our products when you first walk in the door,” she said. “We’d pass bread on a bread board and have a dessert table to help yourself. All of that is gone due to the virus. Yes, people are starting to come back in but it doesn’t feel like us yet.”
She’s not sure if the old way of enticing customers will come back but the customers themselves are coming back through the door. Now she faces a familiar problem across the Delta business world – being short-staffed.
“I lost three employees when we shut down in March and they haven’t come back,” she said.
She and her mom have been picking up the slack in the kitchen and the dining room floor. They also don’t want to lose their whole atmosphere with sanitary changes.
“We just don’t want to put up sneeze guards and all the stuff that’s not warm and inviting. I just don’t know when we can have our catfish pate out for you to taste,” she said. “We may do something with a dome but it’s not easy and convenient and warm and inviting like we feel we want to be.”
She has had to pare down the menu a bit with having less staff.
“We’re surviving and we’ve been blessed that no one here at The Crown has gotten the virus. We’ve been really good with our protocols,” she said. “We can seat 40 but we’re trying to make everyone comfortable when they come in.”
She has seen an uptick in carry out and also will bring out curbside orders. She has a limited delivery after 2 p.m.
“It has been down like 30 to 35 percent most months. Hopefully, this month will be much, much better.”
At Peasoup’s, co-owner Brenda Lott and her staff have been working with the restrictions this past year and have made some changes to keep accommodating customers.
“I don’t know that businesses will ever go back to normal,” Lott said. “We started closing at 8:00 p.m. when COVID first started. We’re still closing at 8:00 p.m. We’re busy. Our inside isn’t as busy at night but at lunch we’re busy. We fill up and lock the door and give out numbers. Our night business is still probably half of what it used to be.”
The transition into curbside service has helped fill the financial hole somewhat.
“Our to go orders as far as business and doing the same amount of food, we are. I don’t know that we ever slowed down except for that first month when folks were scared to get out,” she said. “We’ve always been 75 percent to go because our dining area is so small. I would almost say it’s about 90 percent now.”
She noted the COVID restrictions probably hurt more of the fine dining sit down restaurants.
“As far as fast food and take out, business is back to normal. When I say back to normal, our inside is not back to normal but business-wise is back to normal,” she said. “We had a month or six weeks where it was really, really slow. We closed our dining room for probably two months and then we took half the tables out. Now we’ve put all but one table back in.”
She like other businesses is struggling to keep employees with all of the government stimulus and unemployment benefits.
“It’s everybody not just the food industry,” she said. “We never had anyone in our business get it (COVID). We did everything to be safe and sanitize and wipe everything down.”
At Young Ideas, Leanne and Alan Silverblatt are looking for the new normal of customers coming back downtown on a regular basis.
“This past year, we went into business in 1973, it’s been the most challenging we’ve had in the 47 years. We were almost shut down for three months but we had to dig deep into creativity and keep us on our toes to figure out how to do more social media,” Leanne said. “When people needed something, we’d take it out to their car or take it to their doorstep.”
She even added a new mobile “dressing room” of sorts for one customer.
“She drove up in a minivan and opened the doors and we put up a big sheet over it and that became the dressing room. We rolled the clothes out on a rack and she took in what she wanted to try on and came out and modeled it. Whatever you could do to try and accommodate people and make them feel safe and still do a little busines along the way is what we had to do. We are slowly trying to get back to a new kind of normal,” she said.
She noted business has picked up and “is much better than it was. Even when we first opened up, people were afraid to get out. We still have a long way to go to get walk in traffic that just comes to Indianola to eat at The Crown and shop all the stores.”
