By QUINTON SMITH and CHERYL ROMANO/YachatsNews.com
Two more Yachats restaurants closed this weekend as business slumped from statewide dining restrictions, fewer Spring Break visitors and to protect staff and customers from possibly spreading the coronavirus.
Ona Restaurant owner Michelle Korgan closed her business at 4 p.m. Saturday. Yachats Brewing + Farmstore announced on Facebook it would close Sunday evening.
Sunday morning the Adobe motel and restaurant announced it would close all its operations starting Monday morning. It has 80 employees.
They follow the closures earlier in the week of LeRoy’s Blue Whale, the Sea Note, Beach Street Kitchen, Bread and Roses, and the Green Salmon.
The restaurants remaining open — for takeout meals only — are the Drift Inn, Luna Sea, the Underground Pub, the Adobe and Outta Gas Pizza.
Korgan said she closed Saturday because she was worried about having workers inside her restaurant and customers clustered outside her take-out window exposing each other to the coronavirus.
“It seemed like the responsible thing to do,” she told YachatsNews.com. “It’s not going to go away unless people stay at home.”
The closures are sending waves of hospitality workers into the unemployment line. Between Ona and the Heceta Head Lighthouse bed and breakfast which Korgan also runs, she laid off 35-40 people this week.
Korgan has operated Ona for 10 years and has figured out the ebbs and flows of a tourist-reliant business in a relatively isolated area of the Oregon coast. You struggle through the winter, then use the uptick in business over Spring Break to get your business to the influx of tourists starting in May.
“Every business has issues and ups and downs, but this is just so big and sudden and unknown,” she said Saturday.
But just because a business closes doesn’t mean its costs stop. Korgan says there’s the last payroll to make, the loss of food inventory, utilities, insurance and rent. She’s already applied for a Small Business Administration emergency loan to help with those costs until she can reopen.
“It’s a crazy time,” she said. “There’s a lot of small businesses out there who won’t make it.”
Yachats Community Presbyterian Church has set up a fund for displaced hospitality workers. It will hand out $100 in cash to people if they bring a letter from their former employer saying they had lost their job because of the coronavirus outbreak and resulting shutdown. It will give the money away from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the west entrance to the church on West Seventh Street.
When Leroy’s Blue Whale closed Wednesday night, owner Angie Lindsley said she had to lay off 16 employees.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before, besides the fire in 1990 when we were closed for 90 days,” she said. “If this stretches on, I have no idea what will happen; I don’t even want to think about it.”
The Green Salmon announced Wednesday night it would be closing for at least two weeks to help people follow the medical advice of “social distancing.”
The Yachats Chamber of Commerce on its Facebook page was compiling a list of open restaurants, their menus, websites and phone numbers.
The Waldport Chamber of Commerce is also keeping people in that area abreast of closures. So far restaurant closures have included the Hilltop Cafe, Azul, Chubby’s, the Flounder Inn, and Pacific Sourdough.
The Drift Inn was offering take-out and delivery service after having had to lay off 40 staffers — most in the restaurant. Yet on Saturday there was a help wanted sign for cooks pasted on its entrance window. The Yachats Mercantile is carrying a selection of frozen meals cooled at the Drift Inn.
“We’ve had some take-out; it’s promising,” owner Linda Hetzler the day after the ban on restaurant and bar in-house service. Noting that profit margins in the restaurant business are already thin, she said she is “hopeful.”
“We’ll try to stay the course and see how it’s working. If I start losing money, I can’t afford that. We’re already tight.”
At the Adobe Resort, Yachats’ biggest hotel/restaurant complex, general manager Anthony Muirhead said they tried to soften the effect of the dining closures by offering curbside food service in addition to take-out. That wasn’t enough. Muirhead said on Facebook Sunday that the Adobe was also worried for the health of its employees and guests.
“We will be completely closed until it is deemed safe for our community and out staff,” he said on Facebook. “This was a difficult decision.”
The only business which has seen it’s sales increase following the outbreak is Yachats Cannabis Co. Although it has cut hours to 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily and is allowing only one customer in the store at a time, owner Katie Bishop said sales had jumped “exponentially.” While she wasn’t sure of the reason, Bishop said she thought it might be because people were worried about the state stopping access to licensed cannabis shops.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said.