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Thoughts from the Bakery: Quarantine Ignites Creativity for Small Businesses

[additional-authors]
May 28, 2020
Photo by Esther D. Kustanowitz

First of all, a quick update on the loan process that I described in the past couple of entries. When I last wrote, we were on the cusp of getting the PPP loan.  Shortly after that entry we were in fact funded with the loan and I have already started to use that money to help cover payroll and other expenses. Ultimately, I’m hopeful that it will all be forgiven as part of the government’s stimulus and small business aid program. That would be great!

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to light a fire under your ass! Navigating the current business environment forces you to stretch your creativity and try new things. I have to say that while it is a lot more work in some ways it can be more rewarding.  Given the limitations of what we can do in a restaurant and given the public’s hesitation to well, being in public we’ve been forced try a lot of new things. It feels like even established businesses are start-ups again.  Areas where we’ve been successful are items that serve a dual purpose: feeding people and also serving an activity. (People are looking for stuff to do!)  Make at home pizza kits and decorate your own cookies are two fun new items that have emerged over the past few months. We also launched a new delivery service specific to Fridays for Shabbat items. Shabbasket was born out of the necessity to bring products to customers, when they can’t come in.  All of these things have helped keep us in our customers minds as well as make up for some of the lost revenue.

I’ve been doing this for almost a decade while that in itself is hard for me to believe, after nearly ten years of essentially the same business you are bound to get stuck in certain ruts. And while I’m proud of the trajectory of my business I must say that being forced to innovate has also reignited some of the early excitement I had when I started. I see this with my peers as well as they try new things. I don’t think that we have any other choice. Business as usual doesn’t exist in the way that it existed a few months ago. And I’m fairly confident that a few months from now even business as usual as it exists today will look dramatically different.

There is talk about when we might go back to regular restaurant service. There are two things at play: one, what we are allowed to do as far as the county is concerned and two, will people actually be comfortable eating out.  I don’t think people will. And so, I come to work every day assuming that the business model of an eat-in cafe is on hiatus and that we’re going to be pickup and delivery for a while.

This week we will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot where we rejoice at the revelation of Torah. We’ve been counting towards this since Passover.  Most years we’re just counting the days from one holiday to the next, but it certainly feels like this year we’ve been counting the days of COVID-19. On most years we stop counting when Shavuot begins. This year our count will continue until we all feel that this is behind us.  But what I’ve learned so far is despite our challenges we are lucky to be healthy and operating as a business and we should continue to count our blessings. Chag Sameach.

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