Reopened Halifax Businesses ‘Fighting To Keep Their Heads Above Water’
HALIFAX — Restaurants, bars, gyms, salons, and other Nova Scotia businesses were allowed to reopen Friday after the province’s Covid-19 health regulations had forced them closed for months.
Cases of Covid-19 continue to fall in the province, and the June 5 reopening date was seen by many as a significant step towards getting the economy back on track.
But for many of Halifax’s small businesses, reopening in a world still gripped by Covid-19 has meant completely rethinking how they operate.
Julie Houde is the co-owner of Queensberry Rules Boxing Studio in Dartmouth.
She reopened for the first time Monday after completely reorganizing her gym to conform to social distancing rules.
She’s had to slash her class sizes from 30 down to 10. She isn’t offering showers or towel service, clients have to bring their own mats, and she’s had to re-train her coaches on how to offer classes in the new social distancing reality.
“It reminds me of when we’re opening this business in the first place. And now two years later it’s like we’re opening a whole new business all over again,” she says.
“We had it all down: we knew our class time, we knew how many people were coming, now it’s just all back to Square 1.”
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Robyn Ingraham, a barber and the manager of Sailor Bup’s Barber Shop, says most of the small business owners she knows have had to “completely restructure everything they were doing because of Covid-19.”
Sailor Bup’s reopened on Friday, but only after all the barbers got together to figure out a schedule that would give them all some work but allow the shop to comply with social distancing rules.
Ingraham says the barbershop even had to change its relationship with its barbers to make things work, moving from a commission-based system to one where barbers rent chairs.
Coburg Social reopens with patio service
Kelly Irvine, the owner and operator of Coburg Social Bar and Cafe, has also had to make major overhauls to keep things running.
“We’ve had to change our model completely in order to try to pull people in,” she said.
Under the province’s new rules, restaurants and bars can seat customers if they only fill up to 50 percent capacity. But Irvine says with Coburg’s size and the way it operates that option didn’t make sense.
Instead, on June 5 she opened her outdoor patio to customers but kept the inside closed.
But that also meant making significant changes to the menu, including bringing in a barbecue to cook up signature hot dogs and burgers. Coburg is also launching a new gourmet pizza menu this weekend.
Serving to outdoor customers only meant she was also at the mercy of the rain clouds for most of her reopening weekend — something that dampened her sales considerably.
With Coburg’s new setup Irvine’s only been able to bring six of her 18-member team back to work, and they can only work part-time.
She says she has no idea when she might be able to bring back more of her employees — and that’s one of just many unknowns starting her down for the rest of the season.
“The thing with this whole thing is there is no certainty about anything. So it’s very difficult as a business owner to plan,” Irvine says. “I can’t even do my schedule more than two or three days out because I just don’t know what the weather is going to be like or the business is going to be like — it’s very, very fluid.”
For Houde, that uncertainty runs even deeper.
Queensberry Rules is operating at a dramatically reduced capacity, with only about half of the coaches teaching, and Houde has no idea if or when that might change.
Even if more clients get comfortable with coming back to the gym, she has no indication of when provincial health guidelines will allow her to expand her class sizes.
“It’s very hard to say if we’re actually able to survive with the setup we have right now. We don’t know when clients are coming back and if clients are coming back,” she says.
Houde says, with the help of government support programs, Queensberry Rules will be able to survive in its current incarnation for at least the next two months.
“Past that, we’ll have to reassess the situation,” she says.
But even though she can’t predict and plan for her business like she normally would, Houde has some optimism for the future of small businesses like hers.
“Entrepreneurs… we don’t go down easy. So I think you’ll see a lot of people adapting and fighting and trying to keep their heads above the water, and I think that represents the entrepreneurial spirit,” she says.