Heidi’s Story
Photo Credit: Sarah Whiting
Heidi Andermack, Co-owner, Chowgirls Catering
Minneapolis, MN
Chowgirls canceled our own 16th anniversary party on March 12 in response the governor’s COVID-19 recommendation that people not gather in groups of 250 people or more. Our party was not the only one canceled. That week 70% of our business canceled. The CDC made a recommendation that people not gather in groups of 50 or more for the next 8 weeks. Here is how that hits Chowgirls.
We are experiencing a huge loss in revenue to date. Adding up March through May, including likely refunds of over $500,000.
These are our minimum expenses, not including the people we employ.
Chowgirls currently employs 130 people. 100 are seasonal servers and bartenders. 30 are employed with regular hours, more than 20 of them on salary and receiving health insurance. Our monthly expenses for payroll, rent, leases, taxes and debt service is somewhere between $145 - 155,000. At this time, our hourly workers have an accumulation of $55,000 in Sick & Safe time banked. And PTO due for the full-time employees is $75,000.
We are preparing to lay off more than 100 part-time and 20-30 full-time employees. It’s likely we will have to close temporarily. And the chance to come back seems implausible. We won’t have any funds to start back up. Keeping up with our monthly expenses and refunding clients for their deposits on events will put us under within 30-45 days.
At a minimum, this is what we need for relief:
- pause on sales tax payments
- pause on SBA loan payments
- pause on rent payments
- access to grants, or zero or low-interest cash
- grants to pay out Sick & Safe time and maintain health care benefits
The only beacon of hope we have at this point is the opportunity to partner with Second Harvest Heartland to prepare emergency meals. We are in talks with them to make such arrangements. However, I fear that they will not have enough funding to cover even SOME of these expenses. Even with our outstanding sanitation standards, as can be verified by Minneapolis Health Inspector Nick Koreen, we are at risk of exposure in offering these front-line services as this means our staff will have to leave their home quarantines for work. Funding for this staffing expense would also help during this time of duress.