By Ellie Stewart

 

For the past fifteen years my family has owned and operated a coffeehouse in our small town. Growing up in a tight knit community our business became my second home. I would spend days there after school doing homework, playing with friends and eventually working there. Our staff became a part of our family as well as our loyal customers. For fifteen years our life went on seamlessly day to day as each coffee was served. 

Fast forward to March 2020, I visited home on spring break and eventually realized that this break was going to last a little longer than I had expected. Much like the rest of the world my family watched the news as Covid-19 updates were flooding every media outlet. Then the mandate came that we were all dreading, a stay at home order. Owning a business during a pandemic can be a tricky thing for many reasons, one being seen as insensitive when I say we were dreading the stay at home order so let me explain. We were happy the stay at home order was mandated in order to stop the spread of the virus, however we knew this would impact our life and our business dramatically. 

One change rolled in after another. We were forced to let go of all of our employees leaving my mother, sister and I to work. Let me just say working with family is never easy, but juggling online school and this was even harder. My sister and I run all platforms of our businesses social media and we knew it was time to get creative. We were lucky enough to have customers that were like family and were financially able to support in these trying times. 

We were one of the lucky few in our town that didn’t have to shut down fully once during the three month period of lockdown. However, honestly the three months after lockdown were almost just as difficult. Our business had suffered tremendous loss and we were now expected to operate as normal again. Distributor prices had been rising and were at an all time high. This is when my sister and I decided to brainstorm ideas of how to ease our way back into the full swing of summer. 

We began running different social media posts to advertise our new ideas. We had to get creative with the stock that we had in order to try to save money. We had our customers pick on Instagram polls what our sandwich of the week would be so they would be excited and come get it. We had a “Christmas in July” week to use up some of the flavor syrups we had from the previous season. We had our employees send in videos saying how they miss our customers that were unable to come in. We teamed up with the local library and other businesses in our town for social media takeovers and helped them sell products or advertise. We even set up a zoom coffee chat room for Saturday mornings when people were unable to come into the store. 

We had to change the way we used social media to fit our needs and the needs of our customers. They needed a place to interact with us, not just see our specials for the week. They were stuck at home and needed their second home to become virtual for them. We as a business adapted, changed and are better for it.