BY LUCIE KRISMAN
In March 2020, groceries were flying off shelves, especially toilet paper.
A year later, Jess Brock, general manager at Gene’s Heartland Foods, reflected on how the chaos at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the grocery store.
It took three or four months for the store to gain its balance back, she said, and today some items like cleaning supplies and food items such as Gatorade and certain soups are only just now coming back into stock.
“It was very frustrating and overwhelming,” Brock said. “There were a lot of empty shelves for a long time.”
This month, the United States entered its one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. Two days after the WHO declaration, President Donald Trump named it a national emergency on March 13. After 12 months, much of the Eudora business community is still working through what that means for them now.
For Gene’s Heartland Foods, it meant difficulty keeping food consistently on the shelves for the first half of 2020, sometimes for eight or nine months for higher-demand items like toilet paper. Now, the warehouse that Gene’s receives its inventory from is able to provide these items more consistently, Brock said.
The store also increased grocery deliveries this year, a service they’ve always offered but became more in demand during the pandemic.
“We also did curbside (pickup) for people who didn’t want to come in the store but were still able to come pick it up,” Brock said.
Curbside pickup also became a popular tool at Bluejacket Crossing Vineyard & Winery this past year, which customers took advantage of while the winery operated at limited outdoor capacity during the mid-summer and fall months.
Owner Pep Selvan said Bluejacket benefitted from generosity from community members and support from wholesale liquor stores during its year of altered operation.
“Fortunately, I think people have tried to be more generous during this time for restaurants and entertainment,” Selvan said. “We just went out of our way to be extremely cautious for our own protection as well as theirs, and almost without exception, the people who came [during the summer and fall] were very respectful and very careful.”
After opening the winery up to limited outdoor seating in the warmer months, Bluejacket closed again due to winter weather and the growing spike in COVID-19 cases around the holidays. The winery saw an overall 40% decrease in its bottom line, going from 12 to only three regular employees.
While they’ve now been able to reopen for limited service and capacity, Selvan doesn’t think Bluejacket will immediately return this year to hosting the events and fundraisers they did before the pandemic’s start.
“I think we’d be happy with 50% or 60% of our previous number of guests,” Selvan said. “For some of the music performers that we had, if we were to bring those people out here, it would turn into a really large crowd. I think we’re going to have to temper that and just take steps through the spring and summer, based upon the success of the virus subsiding.”
The winter months of the pandemic changed things for produce markets and greenhouses, too. With the effects of the polar vortex on Texas, Pendleton’s Country Market saw a momentary standstill on inventory coming out of Texas, such as onion plants.
While transporting operations for selling plants and produce changed during the pandemic, Pendleton said the market did well by pivoting to new ways to sell to customers, such as online selling and front porch pickups.
“I remember receiving frantic calls from other greenhouses and growers as well, (asking) ‘What are we going to do this year?’” Pendleton said. “And then as soon as we all realized that we could sell online, it was sold.”
During last year’s season, Pendleton said, there was an increase in demand for fresh produce that coincided with the desire many had to do more cooking at home throughout quarantining and stay-at-home orders.
”It was actually a fairly brisk spring season,” Pendleton said. “Just like toilet paper, if it was a plant and they could get food from it, they were buying it up.”
While cooking increased this year, many residents opted for takeout from their local restaurants as well. Throughout an eventful year of implementing new precautions, celebrating an anniversary and remodeling the restaurant’s interior, Jasmin Ramirez said Jasmin Restaurant has seen a steady stream of carryout customers.
After being closed for dine-in since the beginning of the pandemic, customers still call asking when the restaurant will fully reopen.
Ramirez said while she isn’t sure when the restaurant will be able to reopen for dine-in, she has missed the daily interactions and life updates that came with conversing with Eudora residents and customers before this year when customers would come to eat at the restaurant.
“I can tell you what somebody will eat as soon as they walk in, and I know their family,” Ramirez said. “When people order carryout, it’s different because all I can say is “hi,” sometimes just like a quick conversation.”
Even though they haven’t been serving customers for dine-in, the restaurant still sees a consistent carryout rush that takes a lot of work to prepare, Ramirez said. When they aren’t preparing carryout orders, Ramirez said they’ve continued cleaning the restaurant as much as possible.
“It’s definitely been a challenge,” Ramirez said. “As it gets to the weekend, we get pretty busy for carryout, so that’s really nice that we still have the steady business and we’re surviving. We’re doing really well from when we first started the pandemic.”
Even with continued business from regular customers, many Eudora businesses have still been financially impacted due to reduced hours and limitations on capacity.
With online sales up and in-person celebrations down, Karen Boyer, executive director of the Eudora Chamber of Commerce, said the struggle for some of Eudora’s restaurants and retail businesses was the strongest during the holiday season.
Boyer worked with entities such as the Lawrence Restaurant Association to organize opportunities for financial support for Eudora restaurants and businesses this year. Grant funding from the CARES Act also went toward relieving businesses of the financial burden of COVID-19, as well as the allotment of $120,000 granted to seven businesses through the Community Development Block Grant program.
“Through the grants, a lot of them were able to hold on,” Boyer said. “But it’s changed the way business is done. People for a long time weren’t going into businesses, and they weren’t even open half the time.”
The implementation of new pickup services and increased cleaning supplies have added expenses for businesses, Boyer said. But with Douglas County COVID-19 restrictions beginning to loosen, she said restaurants and businesses who rely on events and in-person customers might begin to regain their footing.
Jannell Lorenz, who became the new president of the Chamber of Commerce this year, said the Chamber itself has done work this year both to find funding opportunities for businesses and to plan future goals as an organization.
The Chamber’s strategic plan has been in the works, which will outline its long-term goals for the business community.
“I feel like we as a Chamber were able to help advocate for local businesses,” Lorenz said. “We’ve tried to make the most of that downtime to kind of go through and clean up some of our documents and job descriptions and just try to come back from having been impacted and not being able to meet in person the way we would have liked to this last year.”
At her own business, Mateo Chiropractic, Lorenz saw an increase in massage clients after initial quarantines during stay-at-home orders. Many residents experienced new aches and pains due to the new physical circumstances of working from home, she said.
“I’m definitely grateful and fortunate to have had continuing community support in this last year with all the COVID-19 craziness as a non-essential employee,” Lorenz said. “I’ve also had folks from nearby surrounding towns, such as De Soto, start coming to me because they wanted to do business in a smaller town, rather than going deeper in Johnson County and into areas that are more populated, therefore maybe have higher exposure rates. So it’s almost been good advertising for me to work in a small town.”
Massage is a close-contact business, as is dentistry. John Hay of John H. Hay, DDS, said he will continue to implement some of the practices his office has adapted from the year of the pandemic, such as using tools that create less aerosol than before and wearing N-95 masks in place of regular surgical ones.
“I suspect some of these things that we’ve done, not just in dentistry but in society, will probably continue to help us mitigate other diseases besides [COVID-19],” Hay said. “When you wash your hands more frequently, when you stay out of crowded places with others and when you're not working in an office with 200 cubicle mates, you're going to see less infectious disease spread. So I think some of these changes may be with us going forward.”
As vaccine distribution progresses in Kansas, Eudora businesses are preparing to move into possibly another new normal. But what exactly that means, many aren’t sure yet- Pendleton said that just like she has for a year, she will continue to adapt.
“Who knows what’s going to happen?” Pendleton said. “We’ll change as we have to change. We’re all learning as we go through this thing.”
Reach reporter Lucie Krisman at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
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