Covid-19 Crisis Turns Back the Clock at This Seattle Cafe

(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.

Zack Bolotin opened Porchlight Coffee & Records in 2009. In many ways, the Covid crisis pandemic has been a return to his early days running the business. All his employees are gone, and he's back staffing the shop himself, taking only Mondays off. Early on, he realized that government loan programs weren't going to be much use. “No one's really going to do much to help out with this, other than our customers,” he says. Even so, he thinks Porchlight will make it. “I've repeatedly made the joke that we're too small to fail.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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