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Business ending dine-in service voluntarily due to COVID-19 concerns
The Coronavirus pandemic is causing some businesses to close down voluntarily amid concerns.
HOUSTON - As Texas breaks another record-high day of COVID-19 cases, some businesses aren’t waiting for authorities to tell them to scale back. One Houston business owner said he's temporarily ending dine-in service because he’s not willing to make his employees the guinea pigs of figuring out how to safely operate during this pandemic.
Drinking in Paradise has been temporarily called off for Lei Low Rum & Tiki Bar in the Heights. Owner Russell Thoede said he decided to scale back to cocktails-to-go only after reopening for in-person seating for just eight days.
"It didn’t feel great. There was a lot of apologizing not only from us but from guests not knowing, 'Oh, should I stand here. Sorry.' They didn't want to break the rules," Thoede said.
Thoede said between the mandated mask order for businesses and Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission’s undercover enforcement of capacity restrictions, the stress was overwhelming and the rules, too uninviting to thrive in an industry dedicated to hospitality. Not to mention, how unfair Thoede says it is for his workers to have to help police the pandemic.
"As a tiki bar, our main goal is escapism. And so we create a fictional world that you're on an island somewhere and you have no cares in the world. But at the same time we're telling, you know you let us know when you go to the restroom. So we can sanitize the restroom so, you know you don't die. It just wasn't what we wanted to do," Thoede said.
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"They want to tell them, talk to the manager, and have the manager tell someone to put a face mask on. For someone like a bartender, we're not paid lots of money to steer a health crisis," Thoede continued.
Thoede said at one point, Lei Low had a potential scare that one of its employees may have been infected.
"We had one person that went to a protest that one of the people they were with tested positive. I was taking a contact tracing list of everyone that came to the bar just because I thought that was the right thing to do. And, well, I sort of had, not a panic attack, but I got sort of overwhelmed with the stress that I was going to have to call customers and tell them that we had a case," Thoede said.
Thoede is not the first business owner to preemptively make this call instead of waiting for local or state officials.
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Social distancing is not only about preventing the illness itself, but rather, slowing the rate at which people get sick.
The Greater Houston partnership released a statement Wednesday encouraging companies to revert to a work-from-home model where practical.
Large corporations like Apple temporarily closed seven Houston-area stores this week following the surging cases and hospitalizations.
Last weekend, Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, said if the upward trajectory continues, Houston could become the worst affected city in the US.
Thoede said he doesn’t want his employees to become part of that alarming statistic.
"We are going to have to adapt and figure out how to be open as bars and restaurants under these conditions without spread. I just don't want to be a pioneer in that. We're not going to be the control group or the experiment. I'm not gonna make my people be the experiment to see if we can have an economy post-COVID-19.”
Thoede said Lei Low will scale back to to-go only for two weeks and make another decision about reopening later.