Rural Businesses Across America Struggle Due to COVID-19
A view of Auburn’s Main Street along Highway 75 | Photo by Emma Powell
AUBURN, Nebraska – Along Highways 136 and 75 in the cornfields of Nebraska, lies the small town of Auburn. Boasting a population of about 3,500, Auburn has always been a busy town for its size, full of thriving, locally-owned businesses.
Auburn is quieter than usual these days. On March 20, the first and only person in Auburn to contract COVID-19 tested positive. Immediately, the town went into a panic, and many businesses closed immediately. Auburn is a microcosm of what many small American towns are facing in the COVID-19 pandemic, as the virus forces businesses to close and people to shelter at home in an effort to minimize contact and stop the virus from spreading.
Harriet Clark’s clothing store, Village Designs, closed on March 20 in hopes of contributing to the safety of the community. It, too, is an example of businesses struggling to make ends meet as the pandemic sweeps across both urban centers like New York and smaller, rural ones like Auburn.
“The town as a whole has been pretty supportive,” Clark said. “[But COVID-19] pretty much shut me down.”
Village Designs has a minimal internet presence, other than Facebook. This forced Clark to get creative.
“I put things on Facebook, and I have sold some things that way,” Clark said. “I’ve been doing videos of new things we’ve gotten in and they’ve really been nicely accepted. I’ve had some orders. I just shipped a nice order to Washington state last week and I had a nice order from a gal in Texas.”
Online ordering is a tremendous help to a business that normally only reaches locals. However, it is still nowhere near business as usual.
“I’m sitting on a tremendous amount of inventory that I don’t have paid for yet. It’s just sitting there,” Clark said. “That’s my concern more than anything else—how I’m going to get all of that paid for.”
Clark started to do appointments recently, allowing customers to come in and shop one at a time. Nebraska is one of few states that does not have a formal shelter-in-place order, so this is permissible. On the bright side, Clark was able to receive the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan from the Small Business Administration and is able to keep all her staff employed. Other businesses have also been able to receive the PPP loan but are still not able to keep their staff employed due to higher operating costs.
“We’re probably going to have to pay back part of it [the PPP loan] because of just our operating costs, like to-go containers,” Amy Clark (no relation), owner of Arbor Manor Steakhouse and Motel, said. “I wish I would have kept track of how much money I’ve spent in to-go containers. It’s just been a huge expense because you go through so many now.”
With nobody on the highways, the motel is very empty now.
“We have some workers that are here but no travelers,” Amy Clark said. “We get a lot of people that travel through, so we lost all the business because of that.”
Other businesses, like Lifetime Vision Center, are less dependent on travelers but are still being greatly impacted by the pandemic. As an optometry office, Lifetime Vision is only allowed to perform emergency procedures, according to Dr. Darren Wright.
“We went from several hundred per week coming to the office, down to about maybe ten,” Wright said. “It’s a little frustrating for everybody. We feel like we’re not caring for the community like we’d like to. We’re trying to do what’s best for the community at the same time and for our staff.”
While Lifetime Vision was able to get a PPP loan, they were still forced to lay off 14 employees and move the others to part-time work. Of the three doctors, two now work part-time and one was laid off.
Lifetime Vision Center has also expanded its practices online since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act restrictions for telemedicine have eased.
At the same time, some businesses are waiting on the second round of PPP loans to go out. Carla Mason is waiting for this while managing a school-owned, small, nonprofit movie theatre called the Auburn State Theater.
“We did not act fast enough to be funded on the first round so we’re kind of in limbo,” Mason said. “We don’t know that we’re going to get it. The accountant for the school district thinks we will get it for the second round of funding.”
Mason has resorted to keeping employees busy with extra cleaning and limited hours for popcorn orders.
“The only revenue that we’ve created is when we open up on Friday and Saturday nights to sell popcorn and concessions. We call it ‘Popcorn and Passes,’” Mason explained. “But we’re selling all the concessions.”
On April 24, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts announced that restrictions would start to ease on May 4. However, Nebraska’s cases have been rising and have probably not peaked, according to Dr. Jeffery Meade of the Auburn Family Health Center. Now, many businesses are choosing not to open right away.
“We’re not going to open on May 4,” Wright, owner of Lifetime Vision, said. “We’re thinking we’ll probably do that slow opening the week after that. Probably May 11 unless the cases really start to spike, which they are going up dramatically here in the last couple of days.”
Most businesses in Auburn seem to be doing the same thing.
Harriet Clark will maintain her shopping appointments and Facebook sales at Village Design, as she is at high risk for the virus after having open heart surgery seven months ago. Amy Clark will reopen the steakhouse with fewer tables, spread further apart. Mason will continue with the theater as it is now, especially because movie theaters are not allowed to open until May 31. Even then, the theater still may not open right away.
“I think there’s going to be a problem with start[ing] up too because of the content that we rely on the studios for,” Mason said.
Despite the financial burden each of these businesses carry, they care the most about the wellbeing of people in town and their employees.
“We have to take all that stuff into consideration and be extra cautious and extra careful and make sure we’re just being wise and listening to medical experts and not politicians,” Wright warned. “Politicians have a lot of stresses and things on them from all angles to say different things that don’t always make sense. We have to listen to logic, research and science–not people’s opinions.”