WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE ─ Essential Services
ESSENTIAL SERVICES IN A
TIME OF CRISIS How the crisis has impacted businesses in the wide-format and signage market. By Richard Romano
I
t’s been common to see frequent references and riffs on the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” but in this day of quarantining and social distancing, the Marquez title that springs to mind for many of us is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—but not for sign companies. On our special online COVID19 coverage page, we have been tracking what businesses across
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the industry have been doing to help battle, or at least cope with, the crisis. We are also conducting a short survey to update our “Printing Outlook 2020” report as obviously our outlook for the year has, um, changed since December when we wrote the report. In this, the first of what I plan to make a series of periodic “check in” articles, I take a look at how the crisis has impacted businesses in the wide-format
WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage | May 2020
and signage market. “We’re very fortunate that we have a good amount of work with businesses and industries that fall into the ‘essential’ classification, mainly healthcare and construction,” said Rick Bult, owner of FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “Even though restaurants are considered essential, the amount of work they generate for takeout and pickup isn’t enough to sustain a business. We’re
