Clayton Young | @smartguy_92
Students Walking to Class, Chris Meyer, 2021
Where were you when COVID-19 upended the status quo?
In March of 2020, the coronavirus made its mark on the world by rapidly bringing ordinary life to an immediate termination and in turn left governments mandating quarantines, masks, and eventually vaccinations. Protests and disinformation swept the world as individuals were determined to make their voices heard, whether about the necessity of trusting science or their desire to go to restaurants again.
Two years on, any state governments have rolled back on their COVID-era mask mandates after vaccinations have been effective in curbing rising cases within the population, although some within government are more cautious.
“Worldwide, there’s been a general curve and a drop on how the Omicron virus has happened. . .. You have to wait a couple weeks until you look at it to develop a trend. . . If a test site closes for a couple days in a week, like last week we had a couple snow days. . . or after the holidays,” said Kathy Hewett, Population Health and Outreach Manager for the Monroe County Department of Health.
In order to understand the potential trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, an understanding of how city policy affected positive case levels is crucial. Along with an understanding of policy, an exploration of how Bloomington’s businesses were impacted is also critical in analyzing how cases fluctuate through time.
The hard limits of crowd size set by both local and federal governments put businesses that catered to bringing people together in an awkward position. Talisha Coppock, the Executive Director of the Bloomington Convention Center, said the beginning of the pandemic was grievous to deal with.
“2019 was our biggest year, in terms of revenue and number of events,” Coppock said, “We were at the peak. . . March 14, 15, and 16, we canceled about $700,000 worth of business in three days. At that point, I think, people had hope that we’re just not going to do our spring events and we’ll be back in the fall. So, the fall came. . . and we were at capacity of 25 people.”
The Bloomington Convention Center was established in 1991, with Coppock running the helm since its opening. The capacity limits set by quarantine-era policy put a wrench in how the convention center could operate, previously being able to accommodate around 400 people in normal circumstances.
The uncertainty of the future of COVID resonated in the foodservice industry and left many feeling uneasy. Jeff Mease, the founder, and CEO of One World Enterprises described how his company played the waiting game when COVID first hit.
“At Lennie’s and Hive, which are both restaurants where people come to sit down and eat, we were paying a lot of attention. . . and in just a few days, we went from not being able to imagine that all the restaurants in the United States would close down,” Mease said.
The initial shock of cutting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business meant Coppock and her team needed to come up with solutions fast.
“We moved into being a vaccine clinic for Monroe County. Whenever the vaccine first came out, a lot of [elderly folks] were calling trying to figure out the website. We fielded a lot of telephone calls for them. . . We were also holding blood drives at the same time,” Coppock said.
Simply holding blood drives and hosting a vaccine clinic wasn’t enough to offset the loss of business brought on by COVID restrictions. The convention center was able to secure a “Payback Protection Program” loan, or better known as a “PPP Loan”, which was a program by the United States government that incentivized small businesses to keep employees on their payroll and helped fund other operational costs, such as utilities and rent, according to the Small Business Administration’s website. As of June of 2021, nearly 12 million loans were given to businesses across the country.
“How do we lose that much business immediately and survive?” Coppock asked. “We dramatically cut every expense we could, but we really wanted to keep our core staff because we have employees that have been here for years and would be irreplaceable."
The pandemic’s blow to the convention center’s revenue stream forced them to cut nonessential costs to keep afloat. They cut $40,000 from their marketing budget alone, and around $30,000 from their cleaning expenses, along with cutting nonessential landscaping upkeep. By doing this, they were able to mitigate massive overhead costs and keep essential personnel.
After Monroe County announced a two-week closure, Mease made plans to get his employees on unemployment so their pay flow wouldn’t be interrupted in the face of mass closures.
“Our first interest. . . was how do we help our staff? I thought from the very beginning, my attitude was we have to get our staff signed up on unemployment fast. I was afraid the unemployment system might crash. . . I got together some online meetings with other restaurant owners, just to encourage them to get their people on unemployment,” Mease said.
The unemployment rate in the United States tripled from 3.6 percent to 13 percent, accounting for 8.8 million workers without jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Coppock said that losing all of their business within a three-day period enabled them to change course rapidly and look for other means of getting revenue to the convention center. In fact, the convention center found a revenue source from an unlikely place.
“We pivoted to do some other types of business, like we rented our parking lot out. Fortunately, there was a business in town that needed parking and so we got a significant amount of revenue from renting parking spaces, which is a lot easier than doing events. . .That was one of the values of losing that much business so quickly, we knew we needed to cut things,” Coppock said.
Shortages within the global supply chain hit countless businesses harder than it affected others. Manufacturing hubs overseas were forced out of production by surging COVID cases and the effects of this were felt Stateside. The Bloomington Convention Center was not exempt from the supply chain shortage, forcing them to come up with off-the-cuff solutions to cater to their clients.
“In the beginning, when things were starting to open up, linens and napkins were just a disaster to try to get. . . I was like ‘Well, I’ll go to Party Supply and get some napkins. I’ll wash them at home. Do not have that be the leading driver of why you’re turning away customers.’ Small things like that and sometimes the food order for a 200-person event and some of the food product doesn’t come in. So, then you go to Kroger and try to fill in.
Issues in the supply chain that affected Pizza X and One World were largely mitigated by deals with smaller distributors, rather than dealing with larger distributors like Cisco.
“We have some really good relationships with smaller distributors, and we really try to avoid buying from the 'broad liners’, places like Cisco. Our vendors also have really good relationships with the people they buy from, also smaller,” Mease said.
Two years on and many states have lifted their masking mandates, opting for a personal choice approach to pandemic mitigation. Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana made masks optional on March 4, 2022, with a statement from Aaron Carroll, the chief health officer for IU.
“One-way masking — an individual’s decision to continue wearing a mask — is encouraged for anyone more comfortable wearing a mask in public spaces,” Carroll said in a statement by IU Today.
Pandemics bring disease, terror, and death. They rip a society apart from the inside and cause systems to collapse. Humans are adaptable and modern science has already developed a vaccine for COVID. Who knows what will happen next?
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