Bars and restaurants in Minneapolis and St. Paul are officially one day into a vaccine mandate requiring them to turn anyone without proof of vaccine or a negative test away from their business.
Josh Thoma owns restaurants in Minneapolis and St. Paul, including Smack Shack in the North Loop neighborhood of Minneapolis. He tells WCCO’s Vineeta Sawkar they experienced very few issues on the first day.
“Granted, it’s a relatively small sample size for our first day, but sales at both of our restaurants were down about 50% compared to one week ago,” says Thoma who also owns the Lexington in St. Paul.
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Thoma did say they aren’t hiring extra staff to help check for vaccinations and tests, but is having his existing staff do the extra duties involved and answer questions.
“We had a few guests that didn’t know about it, that weren’t from the Twin Cities,” Thoma says. “But for the most part, we didn’t really have any issues with compliance problems, or people being upset that they had to show this. We had some guests that came in specifically to support it as well.”
Thoma says the mandate comes as they see declining sales already.
“There’s no plan for any kind of aid for restaurants,” Thoma explains. “The unfortunate part is that all of our bills from December in restaurants come due now. So we were busy then, and now all of a sudden we have a significant drop in sales. I think it’ll be challenging for a lot of restaurants.”
Thoma also told WCCO that his restaurants were not involved in discussions surrounding the mandate being implemented.
“To some degree we heard it was coming,” said Thoma. “But, it was kind of a surprise joint press conference by both mayors. We weren’t really involved in the discussion.”
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