by Melanie Lennon
Sheila Corrigan, the 51-year-old owner of The Goodberry in Brooklin, Ontario, has been running her café since 2015.
I spoke with Corrigan about the potentially fatal impact COVID-19 is having on small businesses.
How has the pandemic affected your business?
With COVID, I had to let my staff go. I only had two other staff members at the time…I had to lay them off because our sales were just so bad. I couldn't afford the payroll. So, I cut their shifts and because of that, I cut my hours down. And I can't remember, at first, I think I was still doing instead of 10 to eight, I think we were doing 10 until five. But it was so quiet and sales were so low that I ended up shortening and again, we're only open from noon till five. And we're only open five days a week, so I'm closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. So, it's a lot less. It was really, really quiet the first few weeks. Our sales were down like 85 per cent which is pretty scary. And you think, ‘why am I even open?’ But, you know, I thought if I get just some cash coming in to help me pay some of the bills, you know, I'm obviously not going to be able to pay everything but every little bit helps. So that's why I stayed open.
You’ve moved your business online – what was that process like?
With our business, everything that we were about was kind of that feeling and that atmosphere in our café. Like, people like to come in and hang out and it's just nice ambience with music and lighting and stuff like that and you can find your friends and just kind of relax. So, that's all gone. Now you can't do that. You just come in and go. So, online sales [were] never really a big thing for me. We had a website, but it was just sort of to update what flavours we had, people were interested in our location, and stuff like that. So, I had to learn how to add e-commerce onto our website. And because of everything that was going on with COVID, I couldn't hire somebody to do it right away. Everybody in that line of work is so busy right now because so many businesses were in the same boat as me. We're all trying to get online sales now. And contact-less delivery. So yeah, so I had to learn to do that myself and try to get everything online…So, people can order a bowl of yogurt online, pay for it online. They can select whatever toppings they want on it. I'll prepare it all for them. And then if they don't want to come to the store, they can just pull up outside in their car and phone me and I'll bring it outside.
How long did it take to make that transition?
At least three weeks because I'm not a computer sort of person…who knew? Like with a bowl of frozen yogurt, for example, there’s, you know, six different flavours that you can choose from. There's three different types of sauce. And we had, I don't know, probably 15 or 16 different toppings that you could choose from. So, when you think of all the different combinations, like for each one, I couldn't do it all as one product to say just, ‘boom, yogurt.’ I had to say like if somebody started with vanilla yogurt, and they want chocolate sauce, then you'd say, ‘okay, well, there's vanilla and chocolate. And do you want sprinkles? Or do you want gummy bears?’ And you have to have all those. Whatever possible combination somebody could select has to be entered as a separate line item...You know, with personal stuff going on with family members who are vulnerable and exposed to this and everything else that's going on and finances and stuff, like, oh my god, I really don't want to sit down and spend the time on a hundred different variables of how somebody is going to build a bowl of frozen yogurt. But in some ways, it's like I said, you have to love what you're doing. And in some ways, that kind of was a way for me to deal with things. Because I do have family members like my parents who are older and maybe vulnerable and are exposed. My mom's in a nursing home, there's a lot of concern and worry there. But work can be sort of a healing distraction for me. And I can kind of zone out all the craziness that's going on with COVID.
How do you think COVID-19 will impact small businesses in the future?
I think a lot of things will have changed permanently. Some things will be for the better. I really hope that we see a day when we could all sit in a cafe again, right? And be able to sit down and have a latte and look out the window or sit down with our friends. And I really hope we get to do that again…So many people before were paying cash or they'll be inserting the debit card and putting in their pin. I think using your Apple Pay, or using tap is just going to become, everybody has it now…But, the banks actually charge the businesses more for a transaction that's paid with tap than you do if somebody inserts their card and puts in their pin…On an individual transaction, it's not that much. But when you look at the end of the month, right, it's hundreds of dollars that I'm paying at the end of the month…we're not going to be making money, but we just at this point, you're just looking to lose less.
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