But giant retailers that operate warehouses have additional workplace safety issues to contend with. Amazon and Barnes Noble have had outbreaks of coronavirus in their warehouses, and last month an employee at Barnes Noble’s New Jersey distribution center died from complications related to coronavirus, a company spokesman confirmed. The company said the distribution center had safety measures in place since early March, such as providing gloves and cloth face masks for employees, reducing the number of staff members in the warehouses, disinfecting work stations and equipment and closing the facility periodically for deep cleaning.

The pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis struck at a moment when booksellers across the country were thriving. After many smaller retailers were crushed by the rise of Amazon, a shift among consumers toward local shopping helped to drive a resurgence among independent booksellers. The number of independent bookstores across the country rose to 2,524 store locations in 2019, up from 1,651 in 2009, according to the American Booksellers Association’s membership figures.

The coronavirus outbreak threatens to wipe out those gains. When stay-at-home orders went into effect, most U.S. bookstores closed. Many had to furlough or lay off their staff.

Even when stores do open, it will be difficult to recover lost revenue. Foot traffic will be down, either because states have limited how many shoppers can enter stores or because customers are concerned about going in. Most bookstores rely on author signings and community events to drive sales, and such gatherings are unlikely to be safe until the pandemic has passed.

“Sales are down across channels, and the cost of business is going up,” said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association.

In California, where last Friday the state began allowing bookstores to offer curbside shopping, some booksellers remain wary. The California Independent Booksellers Alliance this week is hosting a virtual town hall for booksellers with a nurse practitioner.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/books/bookstores-reopening-coronavirus.html

This has been the experience of Robert DeMasco, who reinvented his Brooklyn restaurant supply company, Pierless Fish, to make home deliveries to housebound civilians last month. Mr. DeMasco said that after a somewhat rocky transition, business had been brisk. His new customers, he said, are even buying things that many restaurants won’t, like fish collars.

“I probably sold 30 pounds a day of collars,” he said. “I bought shad roe. I ran out in a day, and I had 60 pounds. I was like, really? You guys know what this is?”

In addition to the dried anatomical scraps it markets as pet treats, Pierless has also been offering Spanish mackerel, skate, silver dory and blue catfish. All have sold out.

Cooks stuck in lockdown have also been eager for shelf-stable products like smoked salmon, finnan haddie, salt cod and even one product that none of Mr. DeMasco’s restaurant clients will touch: frozen fish.

He said he had received a rave review for his two-pound boxes of frozen squid from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a longtime customer who, when his restaurants are open, rarely orders so little of anything.

In the old family headquarters on Ninth Avenue, Mr. Rozzo has also been surprised by how willing people are to take a flier on some strange aquatic specimen. “People want a challenge to create dinners with,” he said. “They can’t go to a restaurant, so they’re creating the excitement at home.”

In one day, the improvised Rozzo shop sold 100 pounds of drumfish from the Gulf of Mexico, which doesn’t often swim as far north as Chelsea. All the octopus Mr. Rozzo draped over ice as a conversation piece? Sold.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/dining/seafood-fish-coronavirus.html

Some burglars haven’t gotten far. Shortly after the lockdown in New York, a would-be thief broke into Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, in Harlem, and put a few half-empty bottles of alcohol into a bag. When he came upstairs from the basement, police officers were waiting for him.

“It was the dumbest break-in ever,” said John Stage, the owner.

But other thieves have settled in for a marathon binge. Soul de Cuba, the New Haven cafe, hosted an unwelcome visitor for days.

On April 11, about an hour after the owner, Jesus Puerto, left, an intruder entered the deserted restaurant. He spent three days inside, drinking liquor and breaking bottles. By the time he was arrested, more than 70 bottles of alcohol were missing, contaminated or empty, police records show. Mr. Puerto estimated the break-in cost him at least $5,000, for professional cleanup, glassware, missing and damaged iPads and other goods.

But as news outlets reported the story, he said, he was surprised by an online accusation that he might have staged the intrusion to collect an insurance payment. “My insurance premium is not a low premium,” he said. “There is no money to be made in this. At all. What benefit would we have had?”

Like many restaurant owners, Mr. Razavi, in San Jose, expected the shutdown to last only a few weeks. When he closed his Loft Bar and Bistro, he cleared the bar on the street level and moved all the cash to a safe in the office. But he left the second-floor bar as it was.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/dining/restaurants-burglary-coronavirus.html

But the Kreitenbergs had no experience in aviation and few contacts, only Elliot Kreitenberg’s evangelism for his father’s invention.

“All we could do was say, ‘We’re using this technology that works in hospitals, and we built it so it fits on an airplane,’” he said.

Stan Malicki, a Polish businessman, faced a similar problem generating buzz for his invention, a system that moves airplanes on an electric track, instead of using engine thrust. The company, Aircraft Towing Systems, claimed U.S. carriers could save millions of gallons of fuel each year while reducing their carbon emissions. But on its own, the company couldn’t get traction until the State of Oklahoma got involved.

“Thrust is a terrible way to move airplanes. It’s great in the air, but terrible on the ground,” said Vince Howie, who saw the idea’s value and could do something about it as director of aerospace and defense with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

Mr. Howie persuaded Mr. Malicki to move from Europe to Oklahoma, joining the state’s substantial aviation network, which includes two of the world’s largest aircraft maintenance stations, Tinker Air Force Base and American Airlines. A.T.S. contracted with Oklahoma State University to help develop the prototype, and Mr. Howie became the chief executive at the end of last year.

“It is a collaboration of 10 people with different ideas, and of course everybody we talk to, I always want to hear the negatives,” Mr. Howie said. “I want to hear the negatives so we can put a mitigation or design changes as needed.”

Because good ideas do not thrive on their own, Professor Sarasvathy said, entrepreneurs should remain open to the ideas of their potential customers and investors.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/business/smallbusiness/aviation-coronovirus-impact.html

Importers are already dealing with the fallout of tariffs, not only those President Trump imposed on wines from France, Spain and Germany in a trade dispute with the European Union, but also tariffs that he imposed on goods from China.

As a result of the Chinese tariffs, along with the Covid-19 crisis there, refrigerated shipping containers, or reefers, have been stuck in China, without the trade business that would keep them circulating throughout the world.

This has caused a severe shortage of reefers available for shipping European wines to the United States, a trade already diminished by work stoppages mandated in Europe because of the pandemic, said Catherine Miles, a vice president of The Sorting Table, an importer in Napa, Calif.

While producers, distributors, restaurants and retailers are the most obvious members of the wine trade, other people like publicists and marketers are the lubricants that often keep the machinery operating smoothly. They, too, are facing possible disasters.

Alan Goldfarb in Mill Valley, Calif., who does public relations for small family wineries in California, works on his own, and says his three clients provide plenty of work for him. Since the pandemic hit, he says he has cut his fees, but doesn’t know how much longer he’ll have work.

“I am terrified of losing these clients, who may soon realize I’m not an essential part of their business,” he said.

In the Finger Lakes region of New York, Michael Schnelle and Nancy Irelan, husband and wife, operate Red Tail Ridge Winery in Penn Yan. They depend on restaurants and their own tasting room for income, which has largely dried up. They are now selling wine only online or for pickup at the winery.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/dining/drinks/wine-production-coronavirus.html

“My pessimistic view is that this is going to change the behaviors of everybody in terms of how they dine out and how they buy food,” he said. “People are not going to buy a $300 plate of food, and that trickles down to us.”

At other times, he is optimistic and thinks he ought to plant as many tomatoes this year as he always does. “Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” he said, “and as soon as we open the floodgates we probably won’t have enough stuff people want.”

Others are simply giving up for the spring, and waiting things out.

“Lots of farmers I work with are just furrowing their crops and turning them into compost,” said Naomi Pomeroy, a chef who has temporarily closed Beast, her restaurant in Portland, Ore., and helped create the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which is pressuring Congress to tailor aid specifically for restaurants that aren’t part of big chains.

Waste has become an issue for larger dairies and produce growers, too. Driscoll’s, which produces one-third of the berries sold in North America, is in the midst of a great California strawberry season. But as much as 30 percent of the crop could be lost because institutions and restaurants are closed, and shipping space on planes to global markets is at a premium, said Soren Bjorn, the company’s president.

Food banks or other relief efforts would be a logical place to send the berries, but many are telling the Department of Agriculture that they don’t have the resources to buy them or the space to store them, Mr. Bjorn said.

The farm-to-table set is competing with behemoth growers like Driscoll’s for part of the $9.5 billion in relief money that Congress recently set aside for farmers who grow specialty crops, supply farmers’ markets and raise livestock. But both groups find themselves on the same side when it comes to pushing the agriculture department to use food relief money to help farmers get unsold crops to feeding programs, and to relax federal requirements that stand between farmers and people in need.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/dining/farm-to-table-coronavirus.html

The program’s previous peak came in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina. It disbursed loans of $1.7 billion that year, according to the Congressional Research Service. In early March, Congress allocated funds to support around $7 billion in lending in response to the pandemic. It added another $10 billion through the CARES Act to fund the $10,000 cash grants, saying applicants could get that money even if their applications were denied.

But the demand has been extraordinary.

If every applicant received the maximum $10,000 grant, the funding would cover around one million businesses. But more than three million applied for disaster loans last week alone, Joseph Amato, the director of the S.B.A.’s Nevada office, told attendees at a webinar on Monday. His comments were reported earlier by The Washington Post.

In response to the demand, the S.B.A. appears to have also added an additional restriction on the grants: Dozens of business owners said they had been told that the grant, if they got it, would be limited to $1,000 per employee — meaning the smallest businesses could not receive the full amount.

Even early applicants who have been approved for larger loans still have unanswered questions.

Abninder Mundra, who owns a franchise of the UPS Store in Portola Valley, Calif., applied for a loan on March 20 and was approved four days later for $210,000. He finally received and signed his closing documents this week. He was still waiting for the cash to arrive — and for details about how the $10,000 grant would work.

A retail business owner in California, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing the loan he had been promised, was relieved to be getting the money needed to support his employees, but frustrated about the process.

He sought a loan on March 17, right after his state became eligible. In late March, he received a call from an S.B.A. official who requested additional documents, then verbally approved a loan of $500,000. It took more than a week before he got a letter confirming the loan, along with a pile of closing documents to sign.

Business owners who applied later are afraid the funding will run out before their applications are processed.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/business/smallbusiness/small-business-disaster-loans-coronavirus.html

The Better Pop had been scheduled to return to Smorgasburg last weekend, too, when its Brooklyn markets were supposed to reopen. They are on hiatus now, along with a year-round Los Angeles edition and a planned expansion of its World Trade Center market to two days a week from one. Many of Smorgasburg’s nearly 200 vendors are hanging in limbo, according to Jonathan Butler, one of the market’s founders.

Most Smorgasburg stalls take in more than $2,000 a day, he said, while some go up to $5,000. Most hire from two to six people to help out. The total daily sales was $150,000 for each of the two Brooklyn markets and less for the Los Angeles and World Trade Center markets.

While most vendors don’t have the rent obligations that restaurant owners do, “I suspect they’re feeling a similar level of panic,” he said. For many of the newer Smorgasburg vendors, “the thing they’re most qualified to do is go work in a restaurant. So it’s pretty grim. They don’t have a lot of prospects.”

Some seasonal vendors live all year on their summertime income. Others say the money is nice, but isn’t their first priority.

Like many of the people who sell food at the Queens Night Market, an outdoor bazaar of foods from around the world that has materialized every Saturday night from April to October for the past five years, Hendra Lie does not support himself with cooking. Serving the Indonesian food of his childhood from his stall, Warung Jancook, satisfied other needs.

“The Queens Night Market is my passion,” he said. “I like to cook. I like to present myself and the culture through food that I created.”

Still, the exposure and encouragement stirred his ambitions. Before the coronavirus descended on Elmhurst, Queens, where he lives, he had been planning an Indonesian restaurant. Now, he isn’t sure.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/dining/seasonal-restaurants-coronavirus.html

The association worked out the details with Stacey Chait, a senior director at NYU Langone, who said she has been getting about 100 emails a day with offers of food. “It’s really, really wonderful to be going through this crisis but have such an outpouring of support and understanding,” she said.

Because it is cheap, familiar, portable and everywhere, pizza is probably the food most commonly sent during a crisis. It is not, however, ideally suited to this crisis, in which people have been urged to stay at least six feet away from one another.

“Putting a bunch of pizza in a common break room and asking a bunch of people to come in there is not supportive of what we’re asking of them as far as social distancing,” said Dr. Gartland, the Emory Healthcare executive.

The logistics of pizza distancing have become a familiar topic to Scott Weiner, a pizza historian and the founder of a company with the self-explanatory name Scott’s Pizza Tours. Since about a week ago, Mr. Weiner has helped arrange the delivery of more than 2,600 pizzas to 73 clinics, hospitals, shelters and other care centers affected by the outbreak.

Donations, which by Sunday night had reached nearly $150,000, arrive through the website of his antihunger nonprofit group, Slice Out Hunger. A dozen or so volunteers there arrange for somebody at each care center to accept delivery of three to 50 plain cheese pies. Employees of Slice, an unrelated pizza-delivery app, then place the order with a local pizzeria, which must agree to follow specific anticoronavirus safety precautions.

One of the project’s aims is to support local businesses, and so independent pizzerias are preferred. “But today I ordered from a Pizza Hut because it was the only option,” Mr. Weiner said Sunday.

He conceded that it is challenging to deliver hot food to facilities that are all but sealed off to the world.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/dining/restaurants-hospitals-coronavirus.html

Larger fund-raising efforts are underway to cushion the blow to unemployed hospitality workers. New Orleans has one of the country’s highest poverty rates, and most people working in restaurants don’t earn enough to build up savings. According to the Data Center, an independent local research firm, 93 percent of the full-service restaurant employees in New Orleans are in low-wage jobs where most workers make less than $15 an hour.

Halting tourism and closing restaurants “affects the hotel worker, it affects the bartender, it affects the Uber driver, it affects the tour guide, it affects the whole economy,” said Andy Kopplin, the president and chief executive of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. “Because of our economic base, we’re particularly vulnerable.”

On Monday, the foundation started the Louisiana Service and Hospitality Family Assistance Program at the urging of Gayle Benson, the owner of the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans, who contributed $500,000, with another $100,000 from the McIlhenny Company, the Louisiana-based maker of Tabasco.

The fund is intended to benefit the neediest hospitality workers first, Mr. Kopplin said.

“There are tens of thousands of people in New Orleans who are out of work,” he said. “Every single one of them needs help. The lower-wage workers who were raising kids or taking care of parents before the pandemic, those are the folks who need it the most.”

A provision of the federal stimulus package that President Trump signed into law on Friday provides forgivable loans to businesses that use the money to retain employees and keep the doors open. “It’s a way of making sure you don’t make a decision today that you regret tomorrow,” said Mr. Hecht of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, a former restaurateur himself. “I would encourage people to pay attention to it.”

While they wait for help to arrive, restaurant owners are turning their attention to caring for recently laid-off employees.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/dining/new-orleans-restaurants-coronavirus.html