For some local businesses, the province served up a dish of déjà vu Monday.
Premier Doug Ford announced the return of COVID-19-related restrictions, including a ban on indoor dining until Jan. 21, starting Wednesday.
“It’s beginning to feel like it’s a little bit of abuse here,” said Paul Raymond, owner of the Hog N’ Penny pub in downtown Orillia. “I’m not trying to diminish this thing, but I just wonder about the tactics. There doesn’t seem to be much of a plan.”
Raymond said he understands some businesses, like grocery stores, must remain open to offer essential goods. However, unlike restaurants, proof of vaccination is not required for people to enter other businesses.
“Everyone who comes into (the Hog N’ Penny) is vaccinated. Most are triple. You have a cocoon of people who are vaccinated,” he said. “In many cases, the places where you don’t have to be vaccinated are not closed. They seem to pick on the low-hanging fruit — the bars and the restaurants and so on.”
Raymond’s pub is more “a community of people” than a takeout joint, he added.
“The takeout thing isn’t really worth the time. This hits us really hard because we are really just a pub that sells food.”
While business will decrease over the next few weeks, there will still be expenses.
“We have to come up with the cash to keep the place there,” he said of costs such as rent, heat and hydro. “We’ll hang in as long as we can, but when you have so much invested, you have to ask yourself, ‘How long?’”
Takeout isn’t the top money maker at Era 67, either.
“We’re a dine-in experience. People want to come in and be served, and it’s something we love doing,” said Cory Kingshott, a former manager who helps with the casual-fine dining restaurant’s marketing.
The downtown restaurant does offer dishes that travel well, though, and Kingshott is keeping a positive attitude about the upcoming restrictions.
“Thankfully, we’re able to pivot. We’re going to hang in there,” he said.
Unfortunately, some staff in the restaurant industry will be out of work for those three weeks, which could worsen the staffing issues many have faced as a result of previous restrictions that put people out of work.
“When we have layoffs like this or times when we’re closed, then they have time to reassess whether this is an industry they want to stay in,” Kingshott said. “I just hope everybody shops local so we can all be up and running again.”
For Lone Wolf Café owner Max Lamontagne, it feels like he is “playing catch-up all the time.”
He opened his Matchedash Street South shop in the summer of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic.
“It’s just a repetitive thing at this point. It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” he said. “If they expected the curve to be flattened the first time and the second time and it didn’t happen, my guess is it won’t the third time.”
He wasn’t surprised by Monday’s announcement.
“It was expected. Pretty much every time we get a rumour, the rumour comes true,” he said.
The soaring number of COVID-19 cases was somewhat foreshadowing, Lamontagne added.
“As soon as the numbers started going up, I expected restrictions to come,” he said.
He also won’t be surprised if the ban on dining indoors is extended.
“I really don’t think 21 days is going to do anything. You can’t group more than 10 in your house, but you can sure group more than 10 in IKEA,” he said.
While the majority of his business is takeout, Lone Wolf still takes a hit.
“We have some very loyal customers, and it really does help us out, but we are losing at least 70 per cent of our business,” he said of the decrease experienced the last time indoor dining was prohibited.
It also hurts his staff. He told them they will be temporarily laid off, but he will try to bring them in as often as he can over the next few weeks.
His bottom line is important, but Lamontagne is also thinking of the effects the pandemic and various rounds of restrictions have had on people’s mental health.
“We’ll survive. We’ll see the other side of it, but it is affecting much more than the economy,” he said.
