Seattle Bar Owner Says the Crisis Is Worse for Older Entrepreneurs

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The One Year, One Neighborhood series follows small businesses in the Pike/Pine corridor in Seattle, the first coronavirus hot spot in the U.S., to get a sense of what cities will look like as they reopen.

Linda Derschang has been a business owner in Seattle's Capitol Hill for three decades. She currently runs two establishments in the neighborhood: Oddfellows Café and Linda's Tavern, a bar that became a popular haunt for the city's musicians when it opened in 1994. (Morbid fact: It was the last place Kurt Cobain was seen alive.) Dershang says the Covid-19 crisis is impacting younger business owners differently than people such as her, who are in their early 60s and were hoping to retire soon. “I feel like—sometimes—I was at mile 20 or 24 of a marathon,” she says. “This has set me back to mile 15.”

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