Debbe Andrews-Lewis held onto faith when she opened The Funky Sister — her little shop of dreams — nearly five years ago.
The shop was a tribute to her first husband Terry and their plans for early retirement. A bait shop for the man who loved fishing and, next door, a junk shop filled with the treasures for the woman who loved scouring sales.
Terry died of cancer in 2013, before they could put their plan into action, but his widow committed herself to what she called her “Final I love you.”
And people found the shop built out of love and her treasures — first at 48th and Calvert streets, and then in a bigger space on Prescott Avenue, part of an up-and-coming enclave of locally owned shops.
Until March, and the start of the shutdowns as COVID-19 hit.
“Two people came into the shop that whole first week,” Andrews-Lewis told me Thursday. “Prescott looked like the world had ended.”
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Now The Funky Sister is ending, too.
Her three-year lease expires at the end of November, and Andrews-Lewis can’t see far enough ahead to sign a new one.
“Rent, utilities and business insurance for three years is $100,000,” she said. “Plus, I have to buy my inventory.”
In the six months since the pandemic began, her sales have only brought in enough cash to pay two months’ rent.
She’s been drawing on her savings, eyeing a retirement account that has lost value.
“I’ve been paying everything out of my own pocket; I just can’t do it anymore.”
No one knows yet how many businesses — big and small — might shutter in Lincoln in this ongoing pandemic, but it’s not too soon to know that many are hurting.
“I have been a business owner in town for over 20 years,” Andrews-Lewis wrote in a farewell email to customers. “I have never seen it this bad.”
The store’s owner loves Lincoln. Loves filling her store with vintage finds and the work of artists and crafters. Loves her customers. She’ll miss them, most of all.
“But people just aren’t spending money and I don’t blame ‘em.”
She knows shoppers have turned to the safety of online — knows UPS is hiring thousands of new drivers and Jeff Bezos and Amazon are making billions — but she wonders about the cost.
“A lot of us small-business owners, we support other small businesses, but we need support from more than each other.”
Jane Stricker wonders, too.
Last week, the owner of Footloose & Fancy sent a postcard to her customer base, a 4-inch-x-6-inch stamped plea.
“2020 has taught us to be resilient, creative and ever-changing,” she wrote. “We love Lincoln. Right now Lincoln’s locally owned businesses need you to show up and shop.”
Not just at her retail shops.
“Lincoln has many choices when it comes to locally owned restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, repair shops, construction companies, retail stores, salons and so many more,” the card continued. “The simple choice to shop local will impact all of our lives and keep your local gems around.”
She thought about it before she mailed that card, Stricker told me. She wondered if it was too much.
But these past months have been too much; the constant worry of will we make it?
“How do we survive?” she asked. “I go to bed thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.”
The hardest part? “There’s not an end date.”
Stricker and her husband, Matt, own two Footloose/Threads stores, one downtown on P Street and a second at 70th Street and Pioneers Boulevard. The P Street store has been hit the hardest, with so many downtown employees working from home.
They have a lease they can’t break — and one they don’t want to break.
“I don’t want this to be how we end. I’m not asking for a bailout. I just want people to stop and think about where they spend their money.”
Some business experts are predicting a tidal wave of closures, as many as one in every six businesses. The New York Times reported results of an analysis that showed nearly 98,000 businesses across the U.S. have closed permanently since the pandemic.
The Bureau of Business Research at UNL sends out a monthly survey, said Director Eric Thompson. They skipped April and May and started up again in June.
“Pre-pandemic, people worried about having enough workforce and too many competitors moving to town,” he said.
Then the switch flipped.
“They were worried about customer demand or lack of, and COVID-related issues. What it says to me is not only are people continuing to have to work in the pandemic setting, but are also dealing with all the problems that impact small businesses in a recession.”
The Pandemic Recession.
He sees some hope in the responses to the monthly surveys, but what might follow in the months to come is hard to predict.
“We just don’t know if people’s buying habits are going to change in some permanent way.”
Andrews-Lewis doesn’t know, either.
She’s heartbroken.
She feels like she’s let Terry down.
But she’s marking down her inventory as she mourns. She’s wondering if she could transform The Funky Sister somehow, maybe a big sale twice a year on the acreage she shares with her second husband.
She’s sad thinking about her daughter Katie — her only employee — and about Jake, the grandson who grew up in Grandma’s little shop of dreams.
“I’m crying a lot,” she said. “But other than that, I’m doing OK.”