KUTV 2 Interview for pice: How hard did stay at home directive hit Utah businesses
How hard did stay-at-home directive hit Utah businesses?
by Jim Spiewak
Friday, May 1st 2020
SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — The answer to how hard the stay home directive hit Utah could depend on what kind of business you support.
That process got a boost Friday as Utah moved from high to moderate risk.
During the financial crisis of 2008, the highest weekly unemployment claim was 5,205 and during this pandemic, the highest weekly claims hit more than 33,000.
General Manager Alexandra Ortiz says:
Everybody just jumped into action and it's like what can we do to try to mitigate this?”
Ortiz says the last two months have been about adapting and customers have responded adding “we changed our map around and got permission from the DABC to be able to serve people right from our front doors.”
Ortiz says her business has taken a hit but thinks the business will survive.
However, surviving might not happen for everyone, says Grant Baskerville who studies economic trends at the Sorensen Impact Center at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business.
He says a recent study from the Economic Development Corporation Utah shows six out of ten businesses experienced an extremely negative impact from coronavirus adding:
You have a situation where you have a public health crisis combined with an economic crisis so we've never been in this situation before.”
Baskerville says the good news is that Utah's economy is diverse “but we don't have enough data right now to understand just how severely we've been impacted and who's going to come out of this process.”
But judging from Friday’s line outside Shades building for beer pick up, Ortiz hopes to be one of them adding “there's no guarantees, I mean, we are completely dependent on people's continued support.”