KYW Newsradio's Community Comeback series checks in on Philadelphia neighborhoods and livelihoods to find out how small businesses made it through the pandemic and how they are surviving, and even thriving, today.
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Storefronts along Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill have endured many curveballs this past year — and more to certainly come.
“We learned in the past year that we can’t take anything for granted,” said Phillip Dawson, executive director of the Chestnut Hill Business District.
He said the outlook for the neighborhood is good so far: Based on cellphone data, he said shopping seems to have returned to pre-pandemic levels, which is typical for this time of year.
“That kind of mirrored what we were hearing anecdotally from the business owners, that their sales had recovered to normal summer levels,” he said.
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Shannon Lebraun Williams of The Spice Rack agreed the economy seems to be recovering, but it hasn’t been easy.
“At one point, we couldn’t get lids,” he recalled. “We had to find another source, and that’s one of the problems that a lot of the smaller businesses are running into: sourcing materials for packaging, for things that we need to continue on a day-to-day basis.”
Valerie Baker, assistant store manager of Weavers Way, a co-op, has also had inventory issues.
“We have some suppliers that have faced difficulties with COVID — maybe they’ve had employees out because they’ve been sick, sometimes it disrupts the supply chain, it disrupts deliveries,” she said.
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At this point in the pandemic, Baker said there’s no more panic buying, and they’re getting a handle on their stock thanks to customers’ willingness to adapt to online shopping.
“[Online shopping] happened a little quicker than we were ready for, but we jumped right into it,” she said. “We still want to make sure all of our members and our shoppers know we have online ordering capabilities. We can deliver, we can do curbside pickup — I do kind of feel like we’re in a new mini-phase of this.”
Still, COVID-19 looms, and Chestnut Hill business owners are well aware.
“I don’t know that we’re quite out with the delta variant yet,” Baker added. “We’re still seeing more masks again and CDC recommending to mask up. It’s really hard to say, at least based on sales, if it’s over or not.”
While Dawson is concerned about new variants affecting the economy’s comeback, at least we’re better off than where we were a year ago, he said.
“The percent of people who are vaccinated has risen, although it’s still not where we would love to see it,” he noted. “I think that some caution is advised at this point, but I don’t think we're going to slip back to where we were in 2020.”
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