Pizza is Essential: Employee Safety and Company Survival During the COVID Pandemic

As the pandemic began to sweep through Florida, business owners found themselves struggling to understand what their future would hold.  The governmental efforts to stop the spread of the disease shut down non-essential businesses; restaurants were allowed to remain open, but only for take-out.  Unfortunately, most restaurants were not set up to flip into a take-out based operation; surviving was a struggle and for many, an impossibility.  For those who could make it though, the road was not easy.  To write the article, I sat down with restaurant owners to discuss their challenges. 

“Pizza is essential.”  This t-shirt logo was really quite true in the early weeks of the COVID shut-downs; pizzerias were one of the few eateries accustomed to a high volume of take-out orders.  That however did not make it easy.  Surviving as a business was still a challenge, it came at a significant financial cost, and the potential costs of employee health and safety had to take a back…