Seattle cafe owner struggling amid lockdowns, concerned with crime
Dec 24, 2020, 5:27 AM
Seattle area businesses have been hit hard by coronavirus. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
Various businesses in Seattle have been struggling to survive during the partial lockdowns due to COVID-19, and experiencing issues of crime in some areas on top of it all. Ali Ghambari is the owner of Cherry Street Coffee House and joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss his own experience with his cafe’s four locations.
“Personally, I think they are under siege. One thing I personally feel that because of the COVID, … Black Lives Matter, made us start thinking differently, it’s the new reality. We need to be real about the changes. We need to leave a peaceful, just city. And with that in mind, we should be able to come together and make those tough decisions,” Ghambari said.
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However, he’s seen many of the same issues with drug addiction and related crime impacting the area.
“But we have to save our city. … If we don’t have social services, if you don’t have institutions, if you don’t take care of the people that have addiction … We’ve got people that they use oxycodone and they got hooked out in the street, and people that they’re just addicted, and that brings crime with it. So we need to go to the bottom and throw the resources at it, and understanding,” he said.
“This is not going to happen overnight, but we have to see a clear motion forward in seeing that we are truly making some changes,” he added.
His businesses are just barely getting by with the Paycheck Protection Program and other help, though he hopes to return to full strength in the summer.
“We are pretty much grab and go,” he said. “We do roughly about 30% of what we do [before the pandemic]. If we didn’t have PPP, we wouldn’t be in business. And if we didn’t have Greg Smith as my partner, that was generous enough to be able to help us to stay in business, I would shut down all the Cherry Street [locations] a long time ago,” he said.
“I’m hoping we here get some results by beginning of summer,” Ghambari added. “But the good thing is, if we get our act together, people will come back.”
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