Coronavirus: Bar staff told to look for supermarket jobs

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

As Bluff's oyster boats lie dormant at port, a newly-unemployed Wellington waitress struggles to get on the benefit and Auckland restaurant owners consider closing up shop. Across New Zealand, coronavirus has brought the hospitality industry to its knees, Josephine Franks reports.

It took less than 24 hours after the announcement that New Zealand was going into lockdown for Littoria Paku to lose her job. 

The 28-year-old had been working at Wellington Airport's Rydges Hotel as a food and beverage attendant, her hours dropping as conferences cancelled: from 40 in a good week to 30, to 13 in her last week of work. 

With her employer choosing not to take up the wage subsidy scheme, rent to pay and three kids in her family, she had no choice but to turn to Work and Income. But when she tried to apply online, the system was down, and days later she was still waiting to hear whether she'd been granted a benefit. 

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'It's a waiting game to see if next week I can put food on the table.

'I've got another week's worth of rent to pay and I don't even know if I can afford that.'

Finding herself without income as the country went into lockdown was 'kind of like grieving,' she says. 

'You feel at first you're in denial or you think that you're prepared for it and then you get hit with a bombshell – you don't have a job, you don't know if you have an income. And then it's just full of overwhelming emotions.'

The effects of Covid-19 started hitting the hospitality industry early, with a survey by the Restaurant Association of New Zealand showing almost one third of business owners let staff go in the first three weeks of March. 

Looking forward to the next 30 days, more than half said they would cut staff numbers. 

One in five said they would close permanently, meaning an estimated 3780 businesses would shut their doors.

In Auckland, Coco's Cantina owner Renee Coulter is trying to hold off making redundancies for as long as possible – but she knows that won't be forever. For the next 12 weeks, her 25 staff have the wage subsidy scheme to tide them over. But she's struggling to see a time when she'll need the staff to serve a full restaurant on a Saturday night. 

Any way you cut it, she will have to let staff go, she says.

Before closing completely, the restaurant pivoted to a takeaway menu that brought in about 20 per cent of a normal night's turnover. Reopening like that was an option – but she couldn't justify keeping 25 staff for it. 

'Even if we went to level 1 and restaurants could open in their normal capacity, […] if I'm lucky we're going to be at 50 per cent [of turnover] – that's half the staff gone then.'

The problem as she sees it is that even once people feel safe eating out, they won't have the money for it. 'People just aren't going to be going out and going, 'Oh, yeah, I'm gonna drop 100 bucks tonight on dinner'.'

She's taking a tough love approach with her close-knit family of staff. She told them early to start living frugally and saving their tips, seeing the downturn coming as tourists dried up and foot traffic on Karangahape Rd fell. 

Now it's beyond dropping hints. 'There will be some staff I'll be telling to go on the Countdown website and look for vacancies.'

'My advice will be to them, you need to be smart about this month, and you need to be looking for jobs outside hospitality.'

Coco's is more than a decade old now, a stalwart of K' Road known for its checkered tablecloths, happy hour drinks and giant meatballs. How much of that will survive is yet to be seen.  

'We will be there on the other side but I can't say what it will look like. It won't be normal Coco's for a long time.'

Coulter describes herself as 'pretty optimistic, pretty gnarly'. But she gets emotional describing the enormity of the situation kicking in. On a video call with her accountant on the second day of lockdown, she glanced up at the computer screen and caught sight of her reflection: 'I've got my head in my hands, literally'. 

In the days since the lockdown was announced, she's been working flat out with her back of house manager, but says there was no way they could have been more prepared for this because the margins in hospitality are so small. 

'No one has a nest egg or an emergency fund. As an industry we were just super exposed.

'This will be the straw that breaks a lot of people's backs.'

Assistant manager of Wellington's WBC restaurant, Fiona Shaw, shares Coulter's concerns – about whether they'll be able to reopen in four weeks, about what the capital will look like if its hospitality industry is decimated. 

With the city built around its bars and brunch spots, Shaw says she's worried Wellington will lose the thing she loves most about it thanks to coronavirus. The costs to cafes and restaurants of reopening and rebuying stock would be enough to put some out of business, she says. 

When Riverside Market opened in Christchurch in September last year, it was lauded for bringing the 'buzz' back into the city; 'the shot in the arm the revitalisation of Christchurch's central city needs'.

But a 'buzz' isn't conducive to social distancing, and general manager Mike Fisher said as the country moved back down the alert levels, they would be keeping a close eye on what that meant for groups congregating. 

The market had been feeling the effects of coronavirus for a while, as a halt on cruise ships caused tourist numbers to slump. Locals were coming until the end, Fisher said, but as more people started to work from home they lost the trade of morning coffee runs and lunch-time pit-stops.

But the Christchurch hospitality industry has a unique resilience, he says, having weathered the 'significant trauma' of the earthquakes followed by last year's mosque attack. 

'Having seen the city start to reemerge now, I'm hopeful we'll have a really bright future.'

'Maybe that's something we have down here,' he says, saying colleagues in Australia who hadn't had to deal with disasters in the past were more 'doom and gloom' about the current situation.

Christchurch's hospitality businesses had already proved they could be innovative, he says. In the market particularly they had small businesses 'who can be quite nimble and adaptable', who were looking at different ways of getting to their customers, including home deliveries. 

While small businesses are nimble, they're also likely to be hit hard – at all stages of the supply chain. Scott McNeil runs Kāpiti Coast-based fish and game supplier Awatoru Wild Food with his wife. 

The past weeks have been 'brutal', he says. 'It's crazy. My phone's not going, I've got no work whatsoever.'

The first hit they took was around Chinese New Year, when exports of crayfish to China were halted. McNeil says the industry took notice of Covid-19 far before the rest of the country; even a couple of weeks ago it was clear restaurants were 'doomed', he says. 

With fishing deemed an essential service, he could still be out on the water, but decided to wait it out a while longer to see how the virus spread. 

'At the moment I just feel gutted with the whole situation – I haven't got any creative ideas. I just feel flat.'

Like everyone else, he was worried about impending closures. Building relationships with the restaurants he supplied to had been a 'slow, organic process' – if they fold, he'll be working from the ground up, with a smaller pool of restaurants who already have their preferred suppliers. 

Graeme Wright from Barnes Wild Bluff Oysters told a similar story. The season for Bluff oysters only started on March 1, and lockdown cut into what had been a good start to the season for them. 

As soon as the country heard it was going into shutdown, his phone was 'red hot' with restaurants calling to cancel their orders. 

The seasonal nature of the work made this particularly tough on his staff, he says, because they rely on income from a shorter period of time to see them over the year. 

And it was tough on the industry, he says – the start-up costs that came with the beginning of each season would have to be paid twice when things got going after lockdown.

Sean Golding's Wellington spots run the gamut from wine bar to restaurant to craft beer bar, but he's confident they will all come out the other side if the country can get back down to level 2 in the next six weeks.  

Golding owns bars Golding's and The Puffin, and co-owns the two-hatted Shepherd restaurant. 

It won't necessarily be easy, he says: 2019 was a tough year for the industry, leaving business owners with little wriggle room. And then Covid-19 strikes. 

'If you're going to go out of business it's speeding up the inevitable,' he says, 'which is pretty horrible.' 

With the help of government loans and the wage subsidy scheme, Golding said they could get through the next couple of months: 'We'll plan 24 hours in advance.'

Head chef at Pegasus Bay Winery Jackson Smith predicts the Waipara restaurant will be quiet until next summer. 

'We rely heavily on trade from Christchurch over the winter months and who knows how badly all those people have been affected financially over all this, so the last thing they're going to do is go out to eat.'

Their numbers 'dropped overnight' when the influx of Chinese tourists stopped. 

All the staff were finding the uncertainty scary, but it's the chefs from overseas he felt 'gutted' for, he says: earning chef's wages, paying high rent and stuck living alone during lockdown, far from family, while their visas ticked away. 

Krishna Botica sums up what the last weeks have been like for people in the hospitality industry: 'a tornado'.

'You're just being thrown this way and that and you're trying to figure out at every stage what your plan is, what's fair, what makes sense for business, what means that you can keep the lights on.'

She employs 65 staff across her three Auckland restaurants: Cafe Hanoi, Saan and Xuxu. But after business dropped 80 per cent in the week before they closed, she's having to reassess what the future will look like. 

'Realistically the scenarios we're thinking about are losing a business and having to make those staff redundant.'

'I've gone into survival mode,' she says.pulling out every trick in her arsenal to manage her spiking anxiety: meditation, magnesium, yoga.

As the storm rages, there have been moments of light. The staff members who offered up their hours to colleagues who needed them more. The regular who turned up on Tuesday with a chunk of cash for the staff. 

'While it was awful, it was also amazing. 

'We're not wallowing – it's more let's figure out how we can nail this.'