Express session
“It’s not 10 percent, it’s not 12 percent. “Every single thing we sell has skyrocketed,” said Duke, owner of the Southampton Social Club and Union Burger Bar. In the restaurant industry, which has long existed on notoriously low profit margins, the increasing price of food and other goods has been hobbling. Asked if he saw any reason for hope about supply chains getting back to normal, he sighed: “My crystal ball broke a long time ago.” “Last August, we pre-bought our Christmas lights, and they still didn’t come,” he added. Switching vendors, switching item numbers - it causes chaos in tracking sales of that item. “I’m still probably putting in quadruple the hours it should take to fill a store like this,” D’Angelo said via Zoom from his office in the North Sea Road shop. North Sea Hardware owner Steve D’Angelo said that while he thanks his lucky stars he has been blessed with a loyal staff, the continued problems with the international supply chain have made running the shop he opened in the midst of the pandemic far more difficult logistically. “They 100 percent control the conversation,” nightclub and restaurant owner Ian Duke agreed. When we hired in the past, it was, ‘Here is your starting pay, and if you meet these goals your pay will go up accordingly.’ Now … they’re telling us what they want to get paid right from the get-go.” “And then you have inflation in the labor force, and that’s probably more than the material inflation, because there’s not much out there.
When it goes away, you think those prices are going to come down? No, it doesn’t work that way, right? When does inflation go away? We don’t know. We used to pay $3,000 on a certain shipment - now it’s $9,000. Shipping costs have gone through the roof. “We just don’t have the supply, whether it’s labor or products,” he lamented. John Tortorella, owner of Tortorella Pools, said that his business has been hamstrung substantially by a shortage of workers - partly because of immigration rules, and partly due to the flight of many in America from the service industries - and supply chain issues and the soaring costs of goods associated with it. 1 challenge that business owners face, specifically on eastern Long Island, is the employment challenge - getting people to help them run and grow their business,” said Rocco Carriero of Ameriprise Financial Services, one of the event’s sponsors.
At the latest installment of the Express Session forums, “Living With COVID-19 Taking the Pulse of the Local Business Community,” held virtually, via, Zoom, on February 10, representatives of the restaurant, retail, service and real estate industries, explored where the latest winter surge in COVID infections has left the South Fork community and what they see coming next.Įvery business owner said that the greatest challenges facing their personal business and their respective industries as a whole was a matter of supply and demand - either the supply-chain frustrations or difficulty in finding employees - and neither shows any sign of being solved in the foreseeable future, regardless of how the pandemic goes.