AFTER it shut down for two months last year, Jan-Ie Low and her family reduced the hours at their Las Vegas restaurant and converted much of their dining room into a food delivery hub.

Outdoor dining was not an option in the desert heat. Conventions, which bring in diners, were canceled because of the coronavirus.

“If you don’t adapt, you’re going to be left behind,” said Low, whose family has owned the SATAY Thai Bistro & Bar for more than 15 years. Despite the changes made, sales dropped by about 50 percent in 2020 from the year before.

COVID-19 is hitting business owned by Asian Americans on multiple fronts.

Pandemic related closures and restrictions on indoor gatherings were particularly hard on the restaurants, stores, nail salons and other service industries in which many Asian-owned firms are concentrated.

Language barriers and a dearth of banking relationships made it difficult for some business owners to access government aid, even as they coped with an added layer of fear amid a surge in hate crimes linked to racist rhetoric that blames Asians for the coronavirus.

According to a report released last month by the New York Federal Reserve and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) that focused on older entrepreneurs who make up 80 percent of all small business owners, small firms owned by Asian Americans fared worse than those owned by Black Americans and Hispanic Americans — despite going into the pandemic in a stronger economic position.

Some 9 percent of firms owned by Asian Americans were financially “distressed” in 2019 — far lower than the 19 percent of Black-owned firms and 16 percent of Hispanicowned businesses given that rating based on their profitability, credit score, and business funding, according to New York Fed research. Among white-owned firms, the figure was 6 percent.

But businesses owned by Asian Americans took a steeper hit early on in the crisis. By the end of March, sales for Asian-American businesses were down by more than 60 percent from a year earlier, greater than the roughly 50 percent drop faced by other small businesses, according to research from the JP Morgan Chase Institute.

Some 90 percent of small Asian-American firms in the New York Fed study lost revenue last year, greater than the 85 percent for Blacks, 81 percent for Hispanics and 77 percent for whites.

Michael Park, owner of Bobby Schorr Cleaners in Philadelphia, said the dry cleaning business his family has owned for 34 years sometimes made only about US$100 a day in sales early on in the pandemic, less than a 10th of normal. Business picked up a bit over the summer as people became more comfortable venturing out, but sales are still about 25 percent of pre-pandemic levels, he said.

Park used grants and small business loans to cover basic expenses. “We’re just trying to stay afloat,” he said.

Minority-owned businesses were largely excluded from the first round of PPP loans issued last spring, according to research published in January by Robert Fairlie from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Frank Fossen of the University of Nevada.

(SD-Agencies)