Congress, Not COVID, Is Wiping Out Small, Family-Owned Restaurants
By: Sara Boyd
Tags: Politics, Congress, Restaurant, Small Business, Covid 19

I’ve been working at my family restaurant since COVID sent me home from college in March. Hour Place Restaurant — named for the time allotted for Erlanger Hospital employees to break for lunch — has been affiliated with the hospital for over 50 years, and has been owned by my parents since 2007. We opened one month before the stock market crashed. We survived then. Now, 12 years later, we have relocated Hour Place into the lobby of Erlanger Baroness Hospital, and like most other restaurants across the country, we are struggling to keep our doors open.

A snapshot of our daily lives looks something like this: My mother wakes up for work at 3:45 in the morning, gets to the restaurant by 4:30, and stays there usually until 6:00 at night. My father gets there a little later, 5:45 in the morning, and stays until maybe 5:00 in the afternoon. Usually, he runs errands when he leaves the restaurant — we always need something, be it eight boxes of strawberry cake mix or a random ingredient we forgot to put on our weekly order list. My younger sibling and I are students. Now that my live classes are done, I wake up at 8:00am on a good day, get to the restaurant by 11, and get out at either 2pm or 8pm. It’s usually the latter one. Cas stays home alone to work on Junior year of high school classes.

When the four of us are at home, the only thing we talk about is the restaurant. Marketing ideas. Menu plans. Catering templates. Ways to get more business so we can stay open. It’s never-ending. We eat and breathe Hour Place — it’s the closest thing any of us have to a religion. We’re only open Monday through Friday, but on the weekends, without fail, we are at the restaurant.

There is an unspoken understanding in my family right now: we are in this, all of us, 100%. Otherwise, we will not make it through the course of this pandemic. The restaurants in this country that haven’t closed yet know what this feeling is. We’ve all felt it.

The damage COVID has done to the restaurant industry is devastating. We are more vulnerable than most industries to the economic ruin of this pandemic. We are bleeding out; and, rather than applying a tourniquet, Congress is untying it.

Over 110,000 American restaurants have closed since April of this year. To put that in a more relatable context, that’s roughly 1 in 6 restaurants in the country that have permanently shut their doors in the last six months. We can all name more than six restaurants in our hometown that we, if there weren’t a pandemic, would enjoy eating at. Maybe some of us can name an impressive number, something like 20, maybe 30. Remember: for every six you know of, one of them is gone. Vanished. Will not reopen.

Being a small-business family during this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic is uniquely awful. We are directly affected by all COVID reopening plans. All of them. Limits placed on dining capacity, restrictions placed on hours and food delivery method, changing definitions on what it means to be an “essential worker” — even just having the ability to order food from a restaurant — all of these are being determined by how public officials choose to respond to the rate of this disease’s transmission. Those of us that aren’t lucky enough to make the same salary and receive that same taxpayer-subsidized healthcare as members of Congress — those of us who actually work for a living, and know what work actually is — don’t have time for the most recent D.C. nonsense. We have bills to pay, and our federal government, the one that we foot the bill for, is doing nothing about it.

In the absence of any coherent federal response to COVID-19 or sufficient stimulus package to relieve the working class, America’s independent, family-owned and operated, started-from-the-bottom-and-worked-their-way-up restaurants are at the full, unimpeded mercy of this pandemic. We are losing.

The last time I checked in with the Republican and Democratic Party’s rhetoric, are these businesses not supposed to be that mythical realization of the promise of the “American Dream?” If family businesses are what state and federal officials call the hallmark of American ingenuity, hard work, and entrepreneurship, why has Congress failed to extend the Paycheck Protection Program? To send out more stimulus checks?

The vast majority of our elected members of Congress are deliberately choosing not to leverage the powers of their office to support small businesses. The evidence of just how much our industry is suffering is staggering and clear to anyone who bothers to look. You can’t miss it.

That only leaves one option: Congress is ignoring us.

Tens of millions of us have lost our jobs — 2 out of 3 restaurant workers have lost their jobs since March alone. More than 300,000 of our fellow citizens are dead. Unemployment is up at record numbers, again. COVID cases are increasing across the country. The pandemic is not under control, not anywhere near it. It’s getting worse.

110,000 restaurants in this country have closed since April. The Paycheck Protection Program has yet to be extended. We don’t know if we’ll get a second round of stimulus checks. The Real Economic Support That Acknowledges Unique Restaurant Assistance Needed To Survive (RESTAURANTS) Act of 2020, a bill that provides up to 120 billion in Treasury Department grants to small businesses with bipartisan support in the House and Senate, has been completely omitted from the most recent stimulus negotiations. If Congress does not provide immediate relief to the restaurant industry, the independent, family-owned and operated restaurants you know and love in your hometown very well may soon cease to exist.

Shameful isn’t the right word to describe Congress’ utter failure to provide for the needs of the small business community. Outrageous. Indefensible. Unjust. Incompatible with basic principles of democratic governance.

As American as it gets.