Is the Delta Variant the Last Straw for Coffee Small Businesses?
Sixteen months into the pandemic, and I think it’s safe to say that by this point, each of us now falls into one of two camps - drunk on “recovery” or exhausted from a pandemic that doesn’t seem to want to come to an end. Whichever camp you’re in, the Delta variant of the COVID-19 outbreak is here to challenge what we've learned so far, where we think our industry is headed, and how far we’ve progressed into this pandemic.
For many small businesses and their employees in the coffee industry globally, Delta could be the straw that makes the load too heavy to bear. For others who believe that the pandemic is coming to an end, Delta is simply a non-event and we should get about the business of learning how to live with the virus.
No matter what your perspective, we are at a pivotal point in the pandemic, and the challenges we choose to prioritize, i.e. either the Delta variant or economic recovery, could impact heavily on the trajectory of our industry (and the global economy) for decades to come.
From a purely business/industry perspective, there have been winners, losers, and rude awakenings throughout this pandemic that have invited us to reassess the way we do business, build our careers and run our lives in general.
Over the past sixteen months, the entire hospitality value and supply chains have been stress tested to expose weaknesses and unearth new opportunities for individual business owners and the industry as a whole.
Regardless of whether you profited heavily or went broke throughout the pandemic, the stress of having to adapt to changing consumer behaviours has been immeasurable for most of us no matter where we sit in the value chain.
Recently on the Daily Coffee Pro by MAP IT FORWARD podcast, we’ve been exploring what I thought would be the next serious challenge our industry was called to face as we shifted gears to a new stage in the pandemic. It seemed that learning how to live with the virus was the generally accepted consensus of how to move forward around the globe, and the evolving global economic issues would be the next serious challenge that would now take priority.
These challenges included the severe industry labour shortages worldwide, never before seen supply chain constraints, worldwide container shortages and shipping delays, and commodity inflation market driving the price of coffee to record highs, and all are at our industry's doorstep now.
Alas, while I still believe that in time true economic recovery will prove a greater challenge than the pandemic itself (mostly because we never really recovered from the last GFC), those taking note of how the Delta variant is shifting the trajectory of this pandemic are coming to realise that this pandemic is far from being something we can just live with, and said economic issues may further be compounded by what Delta does.
Here in Sydney, Australia, one of the many great coffee-drinking cities in the world, we have been left relatively untouched by COVID compared to most of the rest of the world. That is until the Delta variant arrived in June 2021.
Delta is hospitalising 1 out of 10 people it infects here in Sydney, across all age groups. This has lead our local governments to enforce strict lockdown requirements, asking us not to leave our homes unless absolutely and desperately essential. They’re not fucking around either. A few hundred tickets/fines are being issued every day to people who don’t comply.
In the six months since relocating back to Sydney after having lived in California for 5 years, I have barely had to put a mask on here. It was like living in 2019 again after having spent most of the pandemic in San Diego masked up and locked up.
After a relatively short lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic that forced small business owners in Sydney to adapt or die, those that survived were just starting to find their groove again after being out of lockdown for a year. This time around, however, it seems that more have now been crushed, likely never to reopen their doors again.
And so, sixteen months into the pandemic, we find ourselves back at the very place we started with lockdowns continuing to unintentionally destroy businesses and jobs and the possibility of learning to live with the virus out of reach.
At its peak, we’ve had 112 daily cases reported of the Delta variant, a number most cities would welcome compared to their larger numbers. Because of the high hospitalisation rates that have caused the strict lockdowns, small businesses have been brought to their knees and, as crushing as it is for our industry to be experiencing this, unfortunately, it seems that the government has made the right call in an attempt not to overwhelm our hospitals. As a rich country, we're being told “stay home, we’ll send you money, and we’ll help small businesses too (sort off)”.
In lower socio-economic countries that produce and manufacture many of the commodities (e.g. coffee) that we take for granted on the consuming end of the industry, the challenges of the Delta variant are likely to be more pronounced. Poor access to vaccines and other healthcare, and little to no government financial support, and the desire to escape generational poverty means that their options when it comes to tackling a Delta variant outbreak are infinitely more limited compared to those of us in richer countries.
Combine this with the shipping and economic challenges mentioned earlier and the compounded effects for small businesses at the producing end of the supply chain will have ripple effects locally and globally for years to come, perhaps even decades.
The economic realities that come from this pandemic will permanently alter the way we do business across the entire value chain. Many of those economic ramifications, compounded with the housing market crash that caused the global financial crisis of 2008 (that we pretended to recover from by printing more money and bailing out banks), will come to a head at some point and we should expect the eventual collision to be somewhat epic. When will this happen? Who knows, but by many economic and anthropological indicators, it will be the most vulnerable across our supply and value chains that are hit the hardest.
Our corroded trust in the media, government, science and big business has destroyed our compass to discern truth from and fiction. The question ahead of us now is do we roll the dice and “learn to live with the virus” or is Delta a serious enough threat that we should heed the warnings, lockdown again, and deal with the economic fallout down the track? Either way, we lose something to gain other things and it seems that the Delta variant of this Coronavirus is here to challenge us to choose what will shape our societies, our industries, our businesses, and our lives moving forward.
When all is said and done, I wonder if we'll look back to this particular moment of the pandemic and ask ourselves if we made the right choices for our long-term success, or if we took the short-term win. Only time will tell. In the meantime, businesses will open, businesses will close, and our industry will keep ducking and weaving the challenges presented as we evolve and reshape ourselves onto whatever it is we are to become.
This article was written by Lee Safar @leesafar - Founder of MAP IT FORWARD and Elixir Specialty Coffee, Coffee Small Business Coach/Consultant, and host of The MAP IT FORWARD Podcast. If you’d like more information on joining the MIF mastermind coaching groups Click here for more details. For one on one consulting, contact us here.