dining • shopping • culture Businesses are working hard to serve customers and stay safe: Support them and you support our region’s recovery.
chambers of commerce, and then the Downtown Spokane Partnership and said, ‘We’ve got to get together. Our business community across the board is going to need us.’” Those organizations understood that support was going to take many forms. For example, GSI helped secure and distribute personal protective equipment, or PPE, to businesses that were in need of supplies like masks and latex gloves. They also worked with the Spokane Regional Health District to communicate the recommendations and guidelines to the business community — even as those guidelines shifted in response to medical experts’ evolving knowledge of the virus. “At the core of it, we know that people want to feel safe,” Benson adds. “And with a public health crisis like the one we’re facing, the businesses and organizations have a responsibility in that, as do the consumers. So how do we work together to build that confidence?” Key to striking a balance between economic health and public health is raising awareness. With the help of targeted features like the one you’re reading right now, Inlander General Manager Jer McGregor felt that the paper could serve as a conduit for that kind of info. “The Inlander has been around for 26 years. We have long-standing relationships with many of the businesses most affected,” he says. “And I asked myself, ‘Aren’t we supposed to step in and create some of that collaboration and ask to support organizations that we know need our support?’”
a Community Effort The negative and far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are by now painfully obvious. That pain has been acute in fields like entertainment and hospitality, where good business simply depends on people gathering. For the restaurant industry in particular, the venues that have remained open are operating with an estimated 60 percent to 70 percent loss in revenue. A drop like that is hard to withstand when their profit margins — typically in the region of 5 percent — are already so thin. But the same hardships that have tested their mettle have also given rise to some heartening displays of resourcefulness and compassion. More often than not, they start with a
single question: What can we do to help? And it’s not just the restaurants themselves who are asking. Fellow businesses, advocacy organizations, elected officials, community leaders, neighbors and customers are too. As a champion of regional economic development, Greater Spokane Incorporated (GSI) was looking for ways to step up as soon as the scope of the pandemic became clear back in mid-March. “We were asked to lead the business recovery conversation from the get-go,” says GSI CEO Alisha Benson. “One of the first things we did was call our peers at Visit Spokane and our other partners, the West Plains and Spokane Valley
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22 INLANDER AUGUST 6, 2020
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MARK STARR DAVID'S PIZZA Read the Inlander every week for these kinds of features, and more, where restaurants and other businesses will be able to get the word out on what steps they’re taking to make their goods available safely. At the same time, customers can get a better fix on mandates and expectations.
