Hope was running high for the Jaimes family five months ago when they opened their La Luna Café in Sioux Falls.
The winter months were tough, but as the weather improved, so did business.
“To then be blindsided by a pandemic, that’s pretty disheartening,” said Salvador Jaimes, manager of the café.
Many small business owners across South Dakota are in similarly disheartening situations, not only because of a natural decline in business due to the coronavirus pandemic, but also because their local governments have imposed restrictions on certain types of businesses to slow the pandemic’s spread. Business owners have had to decide whether to close temporarily, or stay open in a reduced or altered capacity.
The South Dakota Municipal League says it doesn’t know how many local governments have enacted coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses. But online research shows the restrictions have spread to localities statewide, from small towns such as Kimball to mid-size cities such as Spearfish and to South Dakota’s largest urban centers.
In Sioux Falls, the city is restricting crowds at retail businesses to 10 or fewer people.
Jaimes said he hasn’t had to self-police at La Luna. Business simply declined to fewer than 10 people at a time.
The Jaimes family has no choice but to keep the business open. It's their livelihood. So they’re serving the few customers in the café and taking orders for pick-up. And they’ve joined with other tenants in their building to petition their landlord for temporarily lower rent payments. They’re waiting to hear how the landlord responds.
Meanwhile, in Huron, the city’s enforcing a stricter closure of public areas. Restaurants can only offer services such as delivery and take-out. Rhonda Sprecher, owner of Don’t Spill the Beans, says she’d lose more money trying to stay open under those limits than she would shutting down. So she closed her bistro and coffeehouse temporarily.
“It’s a very stressful time,” Sprecher said. “You know, nobody knows the right answer. I think that everybody’s trying to just work together on the situation.”
In Rapid City, a similarly strict shutdown of public spaces is in force. That has affected the tap room at Hay Camp Brewing Company, where co-owner Karl Koth is trying to keep the business going with a new website offering bottles and cans of craft beer for pick-up. And he’s planning to use his brewing equipment to make hand sanitizer.
At some point, he may need a loan to help to keep the business afloat.
“We can go for a minute here and then we’ll figure out, how long is this going to last, right?” Koth said. “So that’s a big question in everybody’s mind.”
In some cases around the state, before local governments took action, businesses preemptively shut down or imposed restrictions on themselves as the coronavirus spread. Sprecher said that happened in Huron as cases of the coronavirus disease, COVID-19, began popping up in town.
“A good 90 percent of our community closed,” Sprecher said. “You know, it hit home, and people were worried about everybody else, family and friends that were getting infected.”
Sprecher said she temporarily laid off her small staff, and they successfully applied for unemployment. Koth and Jaimes said they’ve laid off some of their employees.
Small businesses that need help meeting payroll and paying other expenses during the pandemic have been advised to call their banker about forgivable small-business loans authorized last week by Congress and the president. The $350 billion loan fund – which will be administered by the Small Business Administration through local banks – is part of a broader $2 trillion economic rescue package. The loans are available to small business and 501(c)(3) nonprofits with fewer than 500 employees.
Meanwhile, shorter-term options are also available. The Elevate Rapid City economic development partnership, for example, announced Monday it is offering bridge loans to help local businesses and nonprofits while they wait for the federal government loans to materialize.
