Cook County Chamber’s Fall 2020 Business Health Survey

With roughly 20 percent of the county’s businesses responding to the Cook County Chamber’s Fall 2020 Business Health Survey, there was a mix of good news and bad news.

While 40 percent of the businesses reported revenue of 100 percent or more over 2019, 40 percent said revenues were 80 percent or less when compared to last year, and 20 percent reported a drop of 70 percent or more in revenue year to date.

Fifteen percent of the 76 respondents said they were only “somewhat confident or not at all confident of survival.”

More than 50 percent of the businesses cited a lack of staff, causing shorter hours of opening or days closed because they didn’t have the staff to cover the shifts. Restaurants were especially hard hit, with many forced to close in the middle of each week so their staff could rest for the jam-packed weekends.

Almost 60 percent of the respondents came from the city of Grand Marais. Both the Gunflint Trail and Lutsen contributed 15 percent of the survey results, with Tofte, Schroeder, Hovland and Grand Portage at about five percent each.

This summer thirty-nine businesses said they would have liked to add between 0-5 employees to their staff, seven wanted to hire between 5-10, five would have hired 10-15 people and two said they wanted to hire 15 or more workers this summer/fall.

In an email to chamber members, Chamber Director Jim Boyd addressed the work shortage.

“Inadequate workforce is a chronic problem for Cook County, but not to the extreme experienced this pandemic summer. And this despite an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent in June, 7.4 percent in July and 6.2 percent in August. A year earlier, the rate was less than 2 percent. Clearly, a sizable number of employable county residents declined to work this summer, a decision that generous federal unemployment benefits helped make possible. Two strong reasons for staying home were the need to care for children who lost access to childcare because of the pandemic, or concern about elevated personal vulnerability to the COVID-19 virus because of age or compromised physical condition.

“But the staff shortage focused the spotlight most brightly on just how much we depend on international workers holding J1 and H2B visas. In a typical summer, Cook County employers hire several hundred of these workers, and they were almost totally absent this year. This summer proved that we can “get by” without them in a pinch, but at the price of retarded business activity and an unhealthy work environment for resident workers. No one we know is at all eager to repeat the summer of 2020 anytime soon.”

Amen to that.