Boutique Blues

Five local retail shops share their COVID-19 woes.

Rob Reese was ready for a career change. After spending most of his professional life in digital marketing, he wanted to use his skills to breathe new life into a business he could call his own. It turned out Alternate Worlds, the Baltimore County comic book store where he’d been shopping for the past 10 years, was listed for sale. When Reese saw the posting, he thought, “This is perfect, this is the kind of stuff I love!”

In October of 2019, Reese closed the deal on the store. He was excited to make changes to the shop—developing a logo and branding, expanding its offerings of toys, reconfiguring displays, and building up the store’s website and social media presence—and slowly saw his business progressing. He knew there was still a lot of work left to be done in order to grow. But there was one thing he couldn’t have predicted.

“I didn’t know a pandemic was coming,” he says with a chuckle. “I wish I would have put that into the equation.”

Much like restaurants, retail stores have had to adapt on the fly since March, after local governments ordered non-essential businesses to close their doors in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 and later allowed them to reopen with capacity restrictions.

Nationwide, only 45 percent of small retailers reported that their businesses were in good health, compared with 65 percent of small manufacturers and 67 percent of professional service businesses, such as law offices or accounting firms, according to a July survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and insurer MetLife.

While that number improved slightly in a survey taken by those companies during the winter holidays, 64 percent of retailers said they thought the worst of the pandemic was still to come.