Although the coronavirus kept many people indoors over the weekend, area restaurants and businesses say they still saw customers, but certainly fewer than normal.
“It’s definitely slower than usual,” said Danielle Davis, who owns The Copper Closet and Mod+Mkt, both with locations at St. Johns Town Center. “We were just excited to get anything because we didn’t expect people to shop at all. We did OK.”
Davis said some malls where her other Copper Closet stores are located have limited hours. That hasn’t happened at St. Johns Town Center yet, and Davis hadn’t heard anything from mall management as of the morning of March 16.
She said they would run sales to try to keep revenue up, but the situation overall has been “a little stressful.” March typically has been the company’s busiest month of the year.
“We still have rent and utilities and employees to pay, so we’re trying to drive some online traffic,” she said.
Intuition Ale Works announced March 16 it would close indefinitely. The brewery will continue brewing and packaging beer.
Prati Italia in the Markets at Town Center, and Town Hall in San Marco Square, saw about a 30% decrease over last year’s sales during the weekend, said its owners Tom Gray and Sarah Marie Johnston in a joint statement.
To make up for dine-in losses, the restaurants began offering discounted family-size to-go meals. It sold a package with a greens salad, margherita pizza, pepperoni and sausage pizza, pasta with choice of sauce and tiramisu at Prati Italia for $55.
Gray and Johnston said their curbside, to-go meals were well received.
The Medure Brothers restaurant group introduced two promotions over the weekend. One would give a meal to Waste Not Want Not, an organization to prevent discarding food, for every meal sold at their full-service restaurants. Those include Matthew’s Restaurant, Midtown Table, Rue Saint-Marc and Restaurant Medure.
Their M Shack locations offered make-your-own-burgers for $3, using extra supplies from the canceled The Players Championship.
Matthew Medure said he estimated sales were down 20% across the board over the weekend.
Restaurants and bars in some states like Illinois and Ohio have closed. If such a mandate came to Jacksonville, Medure said it would be “fairly devastating on several levels.”
“The lack of sales, the employees not having income,” Medure said. “We’re hoping and looking toward other ways to bring in revenue and keep people busy. We’re anticipating that’s going to happen, we hope it doesn’t but if it does we’re going to try to keep folks busy as much as we can.”
Mayor Lenny Curry ordered restaurants, bars, movie theaters and churches to allow no more than 50 people inside at a time, including those establishments’ employees. Restaurant owners expect more of a hit to business this coming week as they stick to those guidelines.
Matt Joseph, co-owner of Southern Coast Seafood in Regency, said sales were down over the weekend – 50% down March 15, 35% March 14 and 20% on March 13.
“We’re not open today, but I’m worried about this week,” Joseph said. “I don’t even know if it’s going to be worth it if we’re just breaking even … You have to keep people making money and my employees matter to me. If we are breaking even and I’m putting money in their pocket then it would be worth it to us.”
