Maurice Brewster is hanging on. He runs Mosaic Global Transportation, a California company that was growing quickly before the pandemic running the private buses that shuttled tech workers between their San Francisco homes and their suburban office campuses.
Those campuses have been all but empty since March, and many companies aren’t planning to bring workers back until next year. Other parts of Mr. Brewster’s business — providing transportation for conventions, wine tours and other events — are also suffering.
To survive, Mr. Brewster, who is Black, has slashed costs and sought new lines of business, including delivering packages for Amazon — “anything to get the vehicles moving and get some revenue coming in the door,” he said.
Mr. Brewster says he is confident he can make it through the end of the year. After that, he doesn’t know.
“You just can’t go a year unless you have just an endless pool of money to sustain you until March or April of 2021,” he said. “A lot of us are going to go out of business.”
Economists say there is time to limit the damage. Despite a rocky start, the Paycheck Protection Program eventually paid out more than half a trillion dollars in loans and probably saved many businesses from failure, according to research from economists at the University of Illinois and Harvard. But the program lapsed in August, and if Congress doesn’t move soon to replace it, the earlier effort could end up delaying failures rather than preventing them.
Many experts still expect Democratic and Republican leaders to reach a deal on an aid package that includes support for small businesses, but a new, large-scale program seems increasingly unlikely.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/business/economy/small-businesses-coronavirus.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.