SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS DURING COVID-19
America small-business owners moved quickly when COVID-19 started shuttering shops in March. Fine dining restaurants shifted to takeout. Book shops introduced curbside pickup. Gyms offered classes online.
Business owners, it seemed, just needed to face this once-in-a-lifetime calamity and get through a few months, when normalcy would resume. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—government-funded forgivable loans designed to help businesses pay their employees—would help them weather the storm.
Six months later, there’s still no end in sight to the pandemic and no easy answers for small-business owners trying to survive. Strict safety protocols haven’t been enough to get customers through the door for some small businesses, and many owners—crushed by inventory and overhead costs—are grappling with hard choices.
"This is the worst small-business crisis of my lifetime, and I’ve seen a number of tough moments," says Karen G. Mills, senior fellow at Harvard Business School. "I’m quite concerned that we haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg of business closures."
Yelp, the online review website, estimates that almost 73,000 small businesses in the United States had closed permanently as of July 10. And almost half of owners surveyed in late June by the online business network Alignable said they lacked enough cash to get through one month and were taking in less than 50 percent of their pre-pandemic sales.
"We’re finding that you can’t save businesses by just allowing them to reopen," Mills says. "Until it’s safe, their employees don’t want to come back. Their customers don’t want to come back. There’s no one out shopping on Main Street."
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses provided almost half of the country’s private sector jobs and accounted for 44 percent of US gross domestic product. While policymakers are starting to appreciate the economic might of small business, these firms collectively lack the lobbying firepower of large industries at a time when they need aid most, Mills says.
"This is a critical moment for small businesses," she says. "If we lose too many, it will create a long drag on the ability of the economy to recover. We must move now to provide all the support that we can, from congressional action to just remembering to ‘shop small.’"
The situation appears bleak, but owners still have options, says Mills, who led the US Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013 and was an Obama cabinet member. Getting through the coming months will require extreme ingenuity and shrewdness from business owners, and additional waves of aid from the federal government.
Assignment task-
1. Recommend any 3 solutions to these small business owners to survive these tough times and retain their customer base.