For the businesses operating in postcode 3055, which takes in the inner suburb of Brunswick West, this week wasn’t supposed to be a return to March lockdowns.
Penny Kerasiotis runs a cake shop in Brunswick West called Miss Penny Cakes, and she says the impact of the latest lockdown will be “devastating.”
“Any shutdown is loss of income for us,” Penny told ABC News. “We’ve all got families to feed, businesses to run, the bills don’t stop coming in.”
Penny bakes cakes daily on premises for birthday parties and christenings and she also runs a dine-in cafe alongside the shop.
She says while cake orders for celebrations had dropped off, her dine-in business had just started picking up again over the past few weeks as restrictions eased.
“We’ve had great support from the community,” she said. “But there’s always someone doing the wrong thing, with the numbers now going up, unfortunately.”
In her view, shutting down individual suburbs is not the best strategy.
“Doing it suburb by suburb, it’s going to be too difficult to monitor and confusing,” Penny said.
“There’s a lot of mixed messages. From our Prime Minister. From our Premier. If you’re going to lockdown, you lock down the whole state. I think it’s going to be hard to lock down certain parts of the state.”
Across Victoria there are more than 5,700 small cafes and 6,000 small restaurants that have already felt the harsh impact of shutdowns imposed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Only time will tell what the true significant impact of a second lockdown will have on small business owners such as Penny.
Sourced: ABC News.
