GOODER AND HARDER: NYC Restaurateurs: Business Down 40 to 60 Percent Due to Vaccine Mandate.
Pre-pandemic, O’Donoghue’s Pub and Restaurant was a successful business that has been open for 10 years in Times Square, Manhattan.
Fergal Burke, the owner of O’Donoghue’s noticed that his business has seen “a massive drop,” since the vaccine mandate came into effect.
“We don’t have the money here to survive without the help of our landlord, [who] has been very supportive and has been giving us breaks on the rent, but without our landlord, we would not be in business,” Burke told The Epoch Times.
He said that he needed to hire another person to be at the door checking for vaccination proof, which increased his expenses.
Comparing the clientele from pre-mandate to when it kicked in about two weeks ago, “Our business is definitely down 50, I’m going to say 60 percent,” Burke said with a somewhat downhearted tone. “There’s just not people coming into the restaurant, they have the fear of being asked for vaccines.”
Burke and his staff have had to refuse a lot of customers for not having the passes.
“They’re being refused and they get a resentment against us, they don’t get a resentment against Bill de Blasio or Biden, or whoever is mandating us to check for this.”
“It comes as a personal rejection,” he said, further stressing that it’s not O’Donoghue’s that wants this. “We don’t want this mandate, we want nothing to do with this.”
He also noted how the subway is full of people but there’s no requirement to show vaccination proof.
Earlier: ‘A disaster:’ How San Francisco’s office mask mandate is impacting restaurants, bars.
“We finally reopened in June when the [COVID] numbers looked good and when we looked at return-to-office plans for Salesforce and other companies,” Chun said. “In July, things picked up, but then delta hit, plans got delayed and August was just a disaster.”
“We reopened at the end of July, and it’s cost us $30,000 just to be open in that time,” said Leilani Mason, the owner and operator of Southside Spirit House, a SoMa bar that often serves Salesforce, LinkedIn and Yelp employees. “We heavily depend on the happy hour crowd, that’s our bread and butter. But a week after we reopened, the city said, ‘Just kidding, the pandemic isn’t over even if you’re vaccinated and we all need to wear masks,’ and then offices pushed back their reopening plans. We have no customers at happy hours, and we’re having our staff come in but there’s no one for them to serve.”
In New York, there’s also the BLM versus Bill de Blasio war: Why Bill de Blasio’s COVID Passport Edict Is About to Backfire Hard. “Black Americans remain the demographic that’s least likely to be vaccinated in the city. I’m just shocked it took this long for the liberals to shoot themselves in the foot on this one. Why would Mayor Bill de Blasio pass such a racist edict? You think you know someone, huh? No, but seriously, he chucked this boomerang and it’s about to break his face. So much for being part of those BLM murals over the summer, huh, Bill?”