Washington restaurants face hardships

MOSES LAKE — Some might say it’s been a tough year for restaurants.

According to the National Restaurant Association, by the end of 2020, restaurants, bars, pubs and cafes nationwide are expected to lose $240 billion in revenue thanks to COVID-19-related restrictions and closures, while 110,000 restaurants are expected to shut their doors permanently.

In Washington state, that’s 3,000 restaurants — roughly one-fifth of the state’s total — with 20 of those in Grant County and another five in Adams County, said Anthony Anton, the president of the Washington Hospitality Association (WHA).

The total losses to Washington state restaurants, bars and cafes in 2020 because of the pandemic and related closures are expected to reach $10 billion, Anton said. Job losses are also expected to reach around 100,000, he added.

“Independents are about 90% of those closures, especially those with five or fewer employees,” Anton said. “The tiniest ones have been the hardest hit so far.”

Coffee and dessert places have been hit the hardest, Anton said, followed by Asian and ethnic restaurants — places he described as examples of people working hard and investing in their futures as they reach for the American dream.

“Truly, these American dream places have taken the biggest punch,” he said.

Anton also said traffic patterns serving espresso stands across the state have changed as well, with stands located in or around downtowns depopulated by COVID-related closures suffering much the same fate as other downtown stores and eateries, while those farther out did better.

The WHA spent six weeks in September and October calling every one of the state’s approximately 15,000 restaurants to try and find which were open and which had closed, Anton explained. In many instances, getting that information involved three or four phone calls, and even then, sometimes it was hard to tell if a restaurant or cafe had closed permanently or temporarily.

“If we didn’t get a strong likelihood it was closed, we left them listed as open,” he said.

Anton said with monthly losses of around $800 million, thanks to the latest round of restaurant closures, Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed $50 million in grants to businesses is simply not enough. He said he hopes the roughly $300 billion in new Paycheck Protection Plan loan agreed to by Congress over the weekend will help avert what the WHA projects as the possible closure of 45% of the state’s restaurants and pubs.

“It’s a 20,000-page bill, so we need to read it carefully,” Anton said. “This truly could change the failure rate projection. The first blush is positive.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.