Pandemic puts restaurants, staff in limbo

As new reports show millions of Americans are still losing jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic, restaurants and furloughed workers feel they are in a state of limbo.

Many staff who are scraping by on unemployment benefits are unsure when or even if their workplace will slowly crawl back from the worst U.S. economic catastrophe in decades.

24-year-old Sara Barnard works as a restaurant server, bartender, and stand-up comic in the St. Louis area.

As the public health crisis strengthened she was let go of at all three jobs around the same time.

"I thought it was like kind of just a joke. I was like 'Well this is going to last a week and then they're going to be like Ok everything is settling down you can go back to work," Barnard said. "I had no idea that it would be two-plus months and we still have no idea of when we're going to be able to open."

Jeff Crivello is CEO of BBQ Holdings Inc., which oversees about 125 Famous Dave's Bar-B-Que restaurants across the country, and also a dozen locations of the dine-in franchise Granite City.

While many locations are still offering take-out and delivery options, but Crivello said they've had to significantly scale back their workforce.

"It was early March where we had to make the heart-wrenching decision to furlough about eighty-five percent of our workforce," Crivello said.

As his employees eagerly wait to see when they can return to work, Crivello said they have access to unemployment benefits and the company's health insurance plan.

"As restaurants come back online, we're anxious to see what that ramp is," Crivello said. "You know, we don't know if that ramp is going to be back to 100 percent in one month, or is it six months?"

There really is no good time to lose your job but for Nelis Rodriguez, a restaurant worker in downtown Chicago, the pandemic crisis could not have hit at a worse time.

The 45-year-old has been a meat server for two decades at the M Avenue Restaurant & Lounge in the Warwick Hotel.

Rodriguez said the winter months are their slowest time of the year, and major conventions in the Spring bring a lot of money to the city.

As more conventions canceled and regular customers stayed home, the restaurant closed on March 15.

"I'm more concerned if we will ever open again, just because it was so slow right before all of this happened," Rodriguez said. "I don't know if people want to sit in restaurants so close to each other anymore. It's scary you know when you've been doing it for 21 years... That is all I have on my resume. Where do I go next?"

Both Rodriguez and Barnard are thankful they applied for jobless aid early on and are receiving unemployment checks.

More than 3 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits just last week.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.