Saving main street, p.23
Saving Main Street, page 23
“He keeps talking about, ‘I was born in Scranton. I lived in Scranton,’” Trump said. “Yeah, for a few years, and then he left for another state.”
The patio at Cusumano’s was packed with patrons dressed in full Trump gear when at four thirty p.m. Brenda Roscioli took a quick breather outside. That’s when she noticed state police on motorcycles gathering on top of the hill. More police were gathered at the borough hall one block away. She found TJ, and together they saw Secret Service agents and bomb-sniffing dogs walking toward them. By the time the presidential motorcade came rolling down Main Street twenty minutes later, every last customer and most of Cusumano’s staff were outside. The president’s limousine stopped on Main Street, right in front of the restaurant.
“Whatever you think of the guy,” Roscioli said, “it was a wild experience seeing Trump get out and wave.”
Trump headed into Arcaro & Genell, one of the older pizza restaurants in town. TJ was not surprised. The owners were staunch Republicans and openly supported Trump. The president picked up several trays of Old Forge pizza for the Air Force One ride back to Washington, including a pepperoni, a sausage, and a white (no tomato sauce, heavy on the cheese).
Thirteen days after Trump’s appearance, the COVID rate in Old Forge jumped sixfold, according to a study published by the health news outlet Stat. A team of researchers at Stanford looking at Old Forge, among other Trump rally sites, documented a similar spike in COVID-19 cases and also deaths.
The day left TJ with mixed feelings. Trump in town, spreading his bile, only served to roil bad feelings in Old Forge. Yet for one day, at least, it was like the coronavirus magically did not exist. A couple of post-COVID Saturday nights might have been busier, but the day of Trump’s visit was far and away his best Thursday in he couldn’t remember how long.
Chapter 14
It Takes a Village
The wider world seemed aligned against small businesses in the US, but the list of groups that assist them is long and includes what are called Small Business Development Centers. Think of SBDCs as small consulting houses that help even up the sides on a lopsided playing field. Larger businesses have teams of marketing people, finance departments, and other advantages over small ones. The SBDCs, some of which date back to the 1970s, operate with money from the SBA and also state and local governments, universities, and economic development nonprofits. At no cost, a small business can have access to consultants who generally bring decades of experience to the task, whether that’s helping a wannabe entrepreneur create a business plan or serving as a lifeline to a seasoned operator navigating the choppy waters of a crisis.
“We’ve all had barely a minute to breath since this all started,” Lisa Hall Zielinski, the director of the University of Scranton’s Small Business Development Center (most but not all SBDCs are housed at universities), said in the summer of 2020. Zielinski had a staff of five consultants who helped businesses scattered across eight counties, including Lackawanna and Wyoming. Theirs was one of sixteen SBDCs in Pennsylvania and nearly one thousand nationally. An SBDC based at Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, served Hazleton and the rest of Luzerne County. Family-owned businesses in the region could also rely on support from the Family Business Alliance, based at Wilkes University and Penn State Scranton.
Any number of advocacy groups were promoting the interests of small businesses in Washington, DC, and state capitals around the country. Founded in 1943, the National Federation of Independent Businesses is the oldest and largest with several hundred thousand members. The NFIB generally takes conventional pro-business stances against taxes and regulation. Its more liberal counterpart is the Main Street Alliance. Founded in 2008, the Main Street Alliance, which has around thirty thousand members, pushes for more livable wages, better child care, and more affordable health care for all, based on the belief that a healthier and more prosperous community leads to a more robust small business environment. The California-centered Small Business Majority also champions a more progressive small business agenda. Every advocacy and trade group seemed to offer regular webinars during the pandemic and created guides to help small businesses navigate the thicket of agencies and government programs that could provide financial help and other resources.
Trade groups played a similar role. TJ had paid little attention to the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association before the pandemic. But the group, recognizing that businesses were cash strapped, suspended collection of dues and unlocked its website so that any restaurant, bar, or hotel seeking help could log on, regardless of membership status. Soon TJ became a regular visitor. The association sourced PPE when it was hard to find and did a good job, TJ said, synthesizing the jumble of information coming from different government agencies. “The guidance they gave was always really helpful,” he said. Similarly, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry created a “Bringing PA Back” site open to anyone. It, too, provided webinars on everything from PPP to unemployment compensation to the latest best practices for operating responsibly in a pandemic.
The local chambers also did what they could to help mom-and-pop businesses. In addition to webinars, the Wyoming County Chamber of Commerce sponsored a #takeout2020 campaign that had them handing out thousands of dollars of vouchers for area restaurants. The chamber in Hazleton also offered online seminars aimed at helping local businesses regain their footing and gave away several thousand dollars in gift certificates to help local businesses. The Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce was also one of the prime movers behind the newly formed Recovery & Resiliency Task Force that had provided Vilma Hernandez with a small emergency grant. The group raised another $64,000 from community members to enlist the services of two bilingual business development consultants with a goal of helping up to fifty local business owners develop and implement a recovery plan.
“The silver lining in COVID has been this sense that together we will get through this,” said Mary Malone, president of the Hazleton chamber. The virus had hit Hazleton particularly hard, and almost the entire community came together, she said. The one exception among businesses was Amazon. As the head of a local chamber, Malone’s job essentially is to say complimentary things about businesses operating in the area. If nothing else, she typically avoided uttering anything negative. Amazon’s AVP1 plant was a major employer in the area but she was so frustrated over the company’s behavior early in the pandemic that she did not care.
“Amazon blocked us at every turn,” Malone said. “I have nothing good to say about Amazon.”
* * *
Malone was hardly the only prominent Hazletonian with a negative view of Amazon. Kevin O’Donnell spent his entire career at CAN DO, recruiting large corporations to the area and then hyping them locally. O’Donnell had adopted a kind of see-no-evil approach to business in his forty-seven years with CAN DO, twenty-six of which were spent as the organization’s president and CEO (he retired at the end of 2020). But he, too, singled out Amazon. Every other business seemed willing to spare a plant manager for a couple of hours, or at least someone in authority, to attend the occasional association meetings CAN DO held in its various industrial parks. But Amazon, O’Donnell said, rarely if ever showed up. “It was a little disheartening,” he said. “It was even sometimes difficult to get them to talk to another business in the park if an issue or something came up.”
Cargill’s giant meatpacking facility outside of Hazleton, like the Amazon distribution center, had been an early vector for the spread of COVID. “But these two large companies couldn’t have dealt with it more differently,” Malone said. Local leaders spoke regularly with the Cargill plant manager. “Some would say maybe Cargill should’ve acted faster but they agreed to shut down their plant for two weeks and pay their employees,” Malone said. “They worked with us, they worked with our local healthcare systems to retool regarding their setup. They did their best to keep us informed on what was going on inside.”
Amazon, by contrast, acted as if being a global colossus meant not needing to deal with the yokels. Upward of two thousand locals worked at the Amazon fulfillment center, yet Malone said no one part of the Recovery & Resiliency Task Force received even a return phone call from Amazon. “I don’t think anyone in the company cared anything about what was going on in Hazleton and what role they might be playing in spreading COVID,” Malone said. Amazon declined to temporarily shut down to sanitize the building, as Cargill and plants around the country had done following a widespread outbreak.
Amazon workers were more frustrated than local officials. The company refused to share even basic information with them, including the number of people who had been infected at the site or where in the warehouse transmissions were clustered. Asked why, a company spokesperson told NBC, “We don’t think that number is super valuable.” Employees who raised questions about workplace safety inside fulfillment centers elsewhere in the country were fired.
Jim Dino, a reporter with the Hazleton Standard-Speaker, spoke to a half-dozen employees who were working inside the Amazon plant during the first weeks of the pandemic. Several criticized their employer on the record. They complained about a lack of masks and cleaning supplies. Several said the company was not bothering with social distancing or other basic preventative measures. Dino, who retired after thirty-eight years with the paper in 2021, contacted Amazon before publishing any story. He described the various Amazon spokespeople he spoke to as automatons who read from the same script.
Our top concern at Amazon is ensuring the health and safety of our employees.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, we have worked closely with local authorities to help fight this terrible disease.
“They were about the biggest violators around when it came to COVID-19 practices but they just denied, denied, denied what people were telling me was going on,” Dino said.
Eventually, the area’s state senator intervened, and local inspectors were sent into the Amazon plant, ostensibly to check for municipal code violations. The people he was speaking with, Dino said, told him that was the step that finally brought about change. “Only then did management give everybody a mask and start taking people’s temperature and putting tape on the floor and all that good stuff,” Dino said.
The Hazleton fulfillment center featured prominently that May during a 60 Minutes segment looking at Amazon’s treatment of its workers through the first couple of months of COVID. Employees working at the Hazleton site had counted at least seventy confirmed positive cases, but the company stuck with its “not a particularly useful number” talking point. Under pressure, though, the company announced that it was setting aside $4 billion for “COVID-related initiatives to get products to customers and keep employees safe.”
Amazon could afford the extra expenditures. With people afraid to shop in stores, Amazon saw its revenues soar by 41 percent in the second quarter of 2020, and its profits during those three months doubled to more than $5.8 billion.
“They were making money and didn’t care what happened to their employees,” Jim Dino said. “Their attitude was, if something happens to them, we’ll just get new ones.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Vilma’s Hair Salon continued to limp along as summer turned into the fall. There were no drop-ins at a shop where that had been the norm. Everything was still appointment-only. Vilma continued to bring in barely half of what she was making before COVID. She still hadn’t received replenishment of the product she sold. Occasionally, she checked on the status of shipments she was expecting from Italy. They were perpetually “en transit,” figuratively if not literally lost at sea.
Other small businesses in Hazleton were also struggling. The VIP Healthy & More, a juice and sandwich shop near the center of town, had always been less a dream than a pragmatic decision by two Latina women in their thirties, working dead-end jobs in the industrial parks for $12 or $14 an hour. The store stayed closed for the first two months of COVID and continued to struggle even once it reopened. Theirs was a snug lunch and snack spot on Wyoming, one block from Broad. The offices of the Standard-Speaker, two doors down, was indefinitely closed, as were most offices in the eleven-story Hayden Tower at the corner of Broad and Wyoming and the seven-story building across the street from the Hayden. Relief came through the $5,895 VIP received through PPP. Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, a fixture of Broad Street since 1937, was still standing. But with no downtown lunch crowd, sales were not even half of what they had been before the pandemic. Owner Jimmy Grohol, sixty-seven, might have been far more worried about the future if not for the $50,000 from PPP.
The Shop 2 was a couple doors down from Jimmy’s. Two nurses had opened this antique store in 2010, and eventually gave up the medical profession to devote themselves full-time to its success. One, Carmine Parlatore, was the sister of baseball’s Joe Maddon. Neither Parlatore nor her partner, her cousin Francine Umbriac, was getting rich from the store, but, Parlatore said, “we covered our expenses and made a little money and I enjoyed it immensely.” They could have reopened at the end of May, when Luzerne County went yellow, but waited until June and the green phase. They then wondered why they’d bothered. “If we had five people in the store in a day, that would be a lot,” she said. The Shop 2 never had employees, so they did not apply for PPP. The bills kept coming, but they were not generating the revenues to pay them.
Between the Shop 2 and Hazle Drugs at the corner of Broad and Wyoming sat the Poppy Press Coffee Company. Owner Tamara Hersberger, fifty-three, had done a little bit of everything before getting into the coffee and sandwich business: operations manager for a family-owned business, human relations, lean manufacturing consultant, furniture restoration. Tamara had her first child when she was eighteen years old, and she and her husband had seven more kids over the next eight years. Tamara had long been a regular at a café called the Dragon Fly. When she learned it was for sale, she bought it for what she remembers was around $65,000. She renamed the shop Poppy Press, in honor of her father, whose recent death had spurred her to think about buying a business. She opened her doors in October 2019.
“We were really making it,” Tamara said. Then COVID hit. It felt to her as if someone had bent over and pulled the plug on her business, causing everything to stop with a jolt.
Tamara is a stout woman in her early fifties with blue eyes, a round face, and blonde hair she wore pulled back. She did not bother with takeout in a largely abandoned downtown. Instead, she put her effort into getting the Poppy Press ready for the green phase. She spent $3,000 on outdoor seating that would let her seat twelve outside. She rearranged the tables and stools inside so no one was sitting within ten feet of one another. She received $17,732 through PPP but brought back only a single employee. “All my foot traffic is from the Standard-Speaker, from the Hayden Tower, from the other buildings, yet nobody is down here,” Tamara said. She closed for July 4 and decided not to reopen. She donated hundreds of dollars’ worth of perishables to food banks rather than throw them away.
The man Tamara had bought the property from was understanding. Pay what you can, he told her, and we’ll work it out. But she had other bills she couldn’t put off: gas, electricity, the cable company for Wi-Fi, the exterminator who came once a month, her work insurance. With her doors closed, she looked for any catering she could scrounge up: a bridal shower, a birthday party, a memorial. “I’m living on whatever I can make this week,” Tamara said.
* * *
Since the Maloneys had started Sol Cacao, the summers had always been about survival. With no opportunity to offer in-store samples, 2020 seemed destined to go down as their toughest. But the horrific video of George Floyd’s murder, and the protests that followed, proved an inflection point in the fight for racial justice and a recognition by some of structural inequities. For three chocolate makers in the Bronx, it brought sudden attention that translated into orders.
“After George Floyd, there was this move to support local black businesses,” Daniel Maloney said. “For the first time, we got visibility and had people—I mean, people we would never even imagine—reaching out to us and supporting us.”
Bloggers and others who wrote about chocolate were among those contacting the Maloneys. People of color generally were the workers who planted and harvested the planet’s cacao beans, which grow in tropical climates. But the owners were overwhelmingly white. The Maloneys were featured in an article Eater ran about “chocolate makers decolonizing the industry.” New York Makers, an online magazine, spotlighted the bespoke approach to producing chocolate taken by these three brothers who had set up shop in Port Morris. A local news site profiled the bean-to-bar makers behind the Bronx’s first chocolate factory.
“We had been telling our story for five years,” Dominic said.
“And finally people were listening,” Nicholas said, finishing his brother’s thought.
The surprise for the Maloneys was that the horror of George Floyd’s death was so deeply shared (a poll in June 2020 showed that 71 percent of white Americans agreed that racial discrimination was a “big problem”). The resulting racial reckoning meant the country, or at least many (Trump spent much of the summer decrying the “mobs” that had taken over the country’s biggest cities), were looking more deeply at institutional racism and the wide range of privileges whites blindly enjoyed at the expense of people of color. Many tried to do their small part by buying the Maloneys’ chocolate bars. Stores the Maloneys had contacted in the past got in touch with the brothers. Others cold-called Sol Cacao—something that had never happened in its first half-dozen years. Normally, discussions with a store stretched on for months, but a couple put in an order shortly after first contact.
