As I walked into a restaurant for the first time since the pandemic began over a year and a half ago, I couldn’t help a feeling of pure joy coupled with fear. I kept telling myself, this is how I connect with the community, this is how I tell our collective stories. It was surreal to step foot in an industry absent from my life for what has felt like so long, to see fragments of normalcy coupled with social distancing decals and plexiglass. I sat down at a table in the back marked “sanitized” and pulled out my tripod, phone, and list of questions. I scored an interview, what an achievement! The feeling of the table and cushion beneath me was somewhat comforting despite it being universes outside of my comfort zone. We started to chat about the pandemic, the project, the insane state of things. I began to understand the world from their perspectives, a waitress struggling to be tipped despite her best efforts to maintain a safe and friendly environment. A manager having to lay off all employees to stay afloat. An owner having to shut down their doors after barely surviving a year and a half with little to no business and no help from the government. This was our new reality, one that’s not known to the many still shuttered inside out of fear. I realized it was my duty to tell this story, to amplify the voices of the small business community. While connecting with our participants was difficult at first, due to a multitude of concerns of being filmed and representing the company, and facing rejection at almost every turn, we have managed to put out a project that reflects our community, with the voices of those that have suffered the most at the center. We hope to provide a vehicle for change, for education. Without education, we cannot make change.

As we came to terms with the very real impact of covid 19 on businesses around us, we were able to uncover general trends that solidified this data further. Something that struck us while researching was that simply trying to comprehend the basic details of these bills and loans was very difficult as college students. We wanted to recognize that we could not even begin to fathom the idea of actually being a business owner and having to compile all of this information, trying to understand it, while also having to apply and hoping to not get shut out or left hanging. Already having to worry about your business, family, and basic health is enough to worry about without even trying to receive governmental assistance. It is completely understandable why so many businesses, as mentioned in our interviews, felt left out in the cold by the government. 

While we hoped and successfully proved a disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses as compared to large businesses, we couldn’t help but notice the overall suffering in the business community. Yes, employees of larger businesses were able to lead a more comfortable life in the early stages of quarantine and had support from higher management to stay afloat. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t suffer as well. The NYC business community is tightly intertwined, with larger businesses supporting small and vice versa. There’s no bad guy here. The overwhelming support employees of large businesses gave for small businesses was heartwarming, and something very characteristic of NYC. Although many New Yorkers fled to summer homes and moved elsewhere with family, those that stuck around demonstrated the popular quarantine motto: New York Strong. Whether a large or small business, support, and love were at the heart of everyone’s message, with an ever-growing hope for a future where we can see a hospital ward with no COVID patients, dine safely and comfortably, smell some soaps with no mask, and feel the vibrations of live music once again.