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March 22, 2020 VIRAL BUSINESS

No customers, and no safety net

PHOTO | New Haven BIZ Saturdays are usually the busiest day of the week for Jeff Yi. That’s when most working people pick up and drop off their dry cleaning at his stores in Westville and Stratford.
By Michael C. Bingham

Saturdays are usually the busiest day of the week for Jeff Yi. That’s when most working people pick up and drop off their dry cleaning at his stores in Westville and Stratford.

This Saturday is different.

It’s the end of the first full week of the effective shutdown due to the coronavirus crisis. People aren’t going to work, or to social gatherings, so they also aren’t going to the dry cleaner.

Yi, owner/operator of Blue Sky Organic Cleaners & Tailors on Whalley Avenue and Stratford Cleaners & Tailors, estimates business at his two stores was off by 60 percent for the week. Next week, he guesses, he’ll do maybe 10 percent of what he did during a “normal” week pre-virus. “It will be totally dead, I think,” Yi said.

After that, there may not be a whole lot more weeks in business for Jeff Yi.

To manage the unforeseen revenue plunge, he’s drastically cut back the hours of his stores — from 7 a.m.-6 p.m to 8 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays — and correspondingly pared the hours of his five employees. He asked his Stratford landlord to cut him slack on his rent payment. The landlord said ‘okay’ for now, Yi said, but the building owner himself can’t be understanding forever — he has his own mortgage to pay.

Like every other business owner on the planet, Yi has no way of projecting how long the current crisis might last, but he figures “at least two months.” But like many small retailers, he has no rainy-day cash reserves to draw on — who plans for a once-in-a-century pandemic, anyway?

“I do not have anything.” he said.

After the flood

Even if he can keep the business afloat through the immediate crisis, Yi is not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the dry-cleaning business. The pandemic has compelled millions of employees to work from home (or not at all) for the duration; some unknown but surely substantial proportion of those workers will never return to the 9-5 office environment of starched shirts and smartly pressed business suits.

“Some parts of the business are going to be changed permanently, somehow,” Yi said. For now, “It’s going to be tight for all business owners.”

“I’m just trying to hang on.”

 

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