No matter how you slice it: Chico’s reopens after coronavirus scare

MOSES LAKE — The doors at Chico’s Pizza Parlor opened Wednesday for the first time in two weeks after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, just another in a long list of challenges that have faced it and other restaurants during the pandemic.

Though owner Mitchell Zornes is quick to say that his business has been more fortunate than many others that have been forced to close, Chico’s has seen unprecedented challenges in recent months.

“My grandfather started this business, I have it now, and I’ve been there for 40 years,” Zornes said. “I think I’ve seen a lot. I remember the ash when the ash fell, and there was a lot of cleaning to do. But this kind of unpredictable, changing environment is just so hard to adapt to.”

After learning that an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus in early June, Zornes quickly reached out to the county health district. In the meantime, employees contacted each other and began discussing how they felt about the risk the virus might pose to them, as well as to figure out who might have come into contact with the infected employee, Zornes said.

Guidance from the health district, which has reported being strained under a mounting caseload, was slow, Zornes said. A number of employees decided to get tested for the virus, which automatically made them ineligible to return to work for two weeks. Not certain how to proceed, his employees concerned about getting sick and with the restaurant set to open for the day in just hours, Zornes made a decision.

“I had to make a call,” he said. “With the incubation period for the virus of 14 days, I thought the only responsible thing I could do was to close for 14 days and to determine if anyone had contracted (the virus).”

So, on June 10, the pizza parlor’s doors stayed shut. Since then, it’s been determined that the sickened employee likely contracted the virus outside of the pizzeria, Zornes said. Fortunately, beyond the initial case, no other employees tested positive for the coronavirus, he added, and the restaurant was able to reopen Wednesday, June 24, right on schedule.

But those two lost weeks took a heavy toll on the business, not only in lost revenue, but in the costs to replace produce that needed to be dumped, or for the deep scrubbing that the restaurant underwent before reopening. In total, Zornes thinks his business lost about $75,000 to $100,000 in income just from the recent closure.

These summer months are particularly important for Chico’s, Zornes said, because that’s when people are ordering the most pizzas. In a normal year, the restaurant saves away its extra revenue from the summer to help pad it through the winter, when business drops off.

“Now, there’s not so much being put away,” he said. “It’s going to make the winter possibly difficult.”

That would be bad enough, were it the only hit that the restaurant has taken this year.

Pizza places have been some of the best-suited businesses to adapt to months where diners could only get their food through take-out orders, but many of the restaurant’s usual customers stayed home in the early weeks of the pandemic, Zornes said.

He also suspects that financial uncertainty has played a role in the longer term as well, as the nation undergoes a recession and as nervous consumers have stashed away their stimulus checks.

In addition, restaurants rely heavily on predictable trends to determine how much inventory to buy, able to gauge from years past how much pepperoni, cheese and dough they’re going to need today. The coronavirus has done away with all of that predictability, Zornes said, and so he’s having to make more regular deliveries and keep both eyes on his inventory levels. All of that costs money and reduces efficiency.

The business also had to hire an extra employee simply to handle the additional, hourly cleaning regimen required since the early days of the pandemic, Zornes said.

All told, between falling revenues and increased costs, plus the precipitous drop in income from the two-week closure, Zornes said he estimates he’s lost a bit more than $300,000 in business so far this year.

“At the rate we’re going, I’m hoping it’s only a half a million less this year than last year,” Zornes said. “That is something that I never in my life imagined saying.”

Any way it shakes out, the year will be a rough one. But Chico’s is here to stay, Zornes added.

“When I was younger I would worry about how Chico’s would handle the next weekend and where the business would be the next year,” Zornes said. “But the people of Moses Lake keep showing up for us.”