Business owners are jaded, struggling
Solo time during the pandemic has brought discordant waves of emotion. Sometimes I feel at peace in my mind, curled up with a good book, watching the rain and catching up on TV shows I probably never would have watched. Other moments are insufferably lonely. I’ve sung the sad tune before: my friends are in their bubbles, with their roommates, lovers and families, and during indefinite lockdown, I pretty much nixed picnics or even a public bench to sit with people and catch up over coffee. My only real social outing in the past month was a trip to Stonestown Galleria with a friend. The clerk at a soon-to-be-shuttering Aldo shoe store perked right up— it clearly had been awhile since someone visited her. I’m elated to see limited reopenings, even if it doesn’t mean immediate improvement on the social side — at least now I can go somewhere and get iced tea or some other drink. But I sort of wondered if the world of commerce collapsed. I did a quick check-in with several bars recently about how they’ve fared in the lockdown, asking what money they’ve raised, how their parklets are faring, the general health of their business and also how they’re feeling. “How has the business been faring? Not great, to be perfectly frank,” said Jeff Lyon, an owner at Third Rail in the Dogpatch neighborhood at 628 20th St. “We would have had to shut down without grants and loans. That said, even the initial [paycheck protection program] loan didn’t help us too much because we didn’t have enough work for all our furloughed employees to come back on the payroll in order to use the loan in a way that would be forgiven,” Lyon said. He noted that other grants and a “really successful GoFundMe” helped employees and might hopefully help the bar live on in 2021. Lyon was out of town when he messaged but hopes to come back and safely open the bar “as soon as possible,” he said. “I imagine that ‘back to normal’ business still might not happen until 2022, but maybe I’ve become a little jaded from the 2020 Dumpster fire,” he added. At Blondie’s Bar in the Mission (540 Valencia St.
