As part of a nationwide #strike, dozens of NYC businesses closed Friday. Chief Correspondent Abby Narishkin visited two Brooklyn-based companies in solidarity with #protests against #ICE.
Read “No work, no school, no shopping: A general strike to protest ICE is attempting to go national”: https://lnkd.in/gTCxZkwk by Senior Economics Reporter Juliana Kaplan
Transcript
Transcript
Transcript
We’ve lost $1000 of sales in the store, maybe 6 or 7 grand online. Following the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty in Minneapolis, anti ice protesters called for a nationwide strike on January 30th. No work, no school, no shopping. Dozens of New York City businesses closed their doors. We’re going to go visit a few to understand what this means for their bottom line. Evan Hanser was one of them. He and his team decided to close his Brooklyn restaurant Little Egg singing. Ohh, cool. Calls for additional strike. I think that would be really helpful if only people actually did it. And then I have paused for a moment like I’m people. You want ICE to stop all the atrocities that everyone is being bombarded with on social media everyday. But this came with a cost. Last year, same Friday, we did about $2200 in sales, of course. All of our fixed costs are still in place for today. You know, we’re not getting a discount on rent or we’re not getting our utilities, you know, kind of curated. This is coming on the heels of a rough month for New York City small businesses marked by a post holiday slump, freezing temperatures and the biggest Blizzard in years. There’s no small kind of like decision to decide to close it. Single location, independent restaurant for a day. Evan wasn’t the only one choosing to take the hit. On a normal day, Lisa Chang Smith supplies soy sauce to local restaurants like Windson. Known for its viral scallion pancakes. But today her Taiwanese pantry is quiet. Yunhai staff are drinking tea before a protest. Lisa not only shut down her brick and mortar in protest, but also her online shop, which accounts for 80% of her business. Taking the website offline is actually kind of feels powerful to me in demonstration of support, solidarity and show that we can choose to prioritize, you know, people over convenience or community over commerce at any time. Lisa told us. The business can survive the closure because she has multiple revenue streams with wholesale and her online shop plus Lunar New Year will likely give her a sales bump. So for me, I think it’s really about exercising the right to close. Seeing other folks do things gives us permission to feel like we can do that too. And and that’s a role we can play then that’s great.
