Molly's Story

Molly Moon Neitzel, molly moon’s homemade ice cream
Seattle, WA

Many small businesses are now seeing or are expecting potentially devastating drops in sales in King County as Coronavirus changes workers’ and citizens’ daily habits and large group events and meetings are cancelled.

Just my business owner friends have seen giant orders cancelled, foot-traffic business plummet, and thousands of hotel reservations cancel. Many food and beverage and retail oriented small businesses in the Seattle region are at the bottom of our annual cashflow cycle. More Seattleites dine, drink and get dessert out when the sun is out and weather is warm. Many of us hold our breath in the last few months of winter in terms of cashflow.

To that end, I have several requests or suggestions for how state, county and city governments can relieve the burdens that this Coronavirus outbreak is bringing to small businesses and will likely bring to our employees:

• Waive penalties and fees for late payments for, or extend temporary holidays on the some specific small business taxes

• Waive certain requirements around unemployment benefits.

  • One option for many small businesses and our part-time employees is to request to the state unemployment office that our employees qualify for a “Shared Work” unemployment benefit. This benefit allows employers who are seeing dramatic reductions in sales to reduce workers’ hours by 10% - 50% and direct their employees to apply for unemployment benefits on the amount of hours lost due to that reduction. This program requires workers to wait one week to file, but does not require that workers look for work while claiming this benefit.

  • Other options for types of unemployment benefits that workers can receive all require workers to be applying for 3 jobs / week.

• Encourage / strongly recommend landlords change terms on April (and beyond) Rent. April 1 rent could be a huge problem for many small businesses. Landlords allowing small businesses impacted by Coronavirus to not pay April 1 rent on time and have that payment (and potentially May 1) amortized over the remainder of their leases could be very helpful. Public officials’ encouragement of this idea could make it more likely.

• Ensure workers can use Paid Family leave when they are sick or caring for sick loved ones. Washington’s new paid family leave program payouts were already backlogged and delayed since January.  We don’t want employees who qualify to take these benefits not to be able to access them. 

Read the full memo to city officials from The Seattle Times.