Yeah, the second shutdown order just ramped down on the first. This was the one that went in and shut particular sections of stores that were still open. So like it
So this was the order that said you can’t go out on a lake by yourself in your boat in your private lake, if the boat has a motor. But if it doesn’t have a motor, you can go. Things that seemed a lot more arbitrary. The one that said you can’t have someone come mow your lawn, even though they pull up in a truck, they drive the lawnmower off, they don’t touch you, they don’t go into your house. It’s just one guy mowing your lawn. You know, things that people started thinking, like, the economy’s already in freefall, is it really necessary to go this far with it?
From my own experience, if the economy takes a dump and we can’t get back to where we were, we have to cut their health insurance or we’re going to have to lay people off. We’re going to take other measures to stay afloat. I don’t know what we’re going to have to do. I don’t want to hypothesize. I don’t want my employees to listen to this and be like, what did you say is going to happen? I don’t know, we’re going to have do something. We can’t just suddenly take a 30 percent to 50 percent decline. That’s huge. What if you got a 50 percent pay cut? It would affect your life.
And so I’m thinking about the ripple effect. We take a 30 percent to 50 percent drop. Our employees take a dip. Maybe they can’t afford to pay their debts. Maybe they can’t afford to pay their own mortgages or whatever. I don’t know. I haven’t assessed the financial situation of each of my employees.
But I guess what I am frustrated about — and I don’t want to minimize the risk of Covid-19 or the people who’ve had it — but as someone who’s worked for 10 years in this business trying to build it up, get it to where it is, I’m frustrated with the attitude of some people that we can just shut it off for a while, and then just turn it back on when everything’s safe, and just pick up where we left off. Like, no, that’s not how business works. That’s certainly not how small business works. If you take a big enough hit, it’s hard to recover from it, you know?
