Michigan restaurants and taverns have been closed since March 16 under executive orders Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus. Many owners are unsure whether or how long their business can survive, while employees don’t know if they’ll have jobs to return to when the lockdown ends.

Jeff Henderson is the owner of Hender-Tainment LLC, and before the lockdown, he ran weekly trivia nights at a dozen Jackson County bars. Now his business is closed, along with the rest of this industry.

“I am not providing services at all right now,” Henderson told Michigan Capitol Confidential. “My parent company has managed to find a way to engage those people who play our games on a weekly basis by providing an online music bingo game. The DJ Trivia owners have also figured out a way to run a trivia game via the net as well. We make zero money doing this but it keeps us at the forefront of people’s minds. We must be diligent and creative at this time in order to survive.”

Henderson said he’s not making any money, and because there is no work, he also can’t pay the independent event hosts who would usually be running the games in bars and restaurants.

“Fortunately, I think most of my hosts are still working at their days jobs,” Henderson said.

In addition to providing trivia games and DJs as an extra draw for hospitality establishments, the business also runs fundraising events for nonprofit organizations. Henderson said he started the business five years ago, and it took about four years to get well-established.

Henderson says he has already lost at least $5,400 since the shutdown began, with no end in sight, given talk of extended restrictions and social distance protocols.

“Obviously, this is dire to the utmost extreme,” Henderson said. “I don’t have any income at the moment. I do have savings which I have been paying the bills with. I applied for unemployment benefits but have had issues being approved due to being a 1099 (independent contractor) worker.”

Henderson said he’s been working through the financial issues of the shutdown.

“It is moving slowly,” he explained. “I applied for the SBA small business loan but have not heard anything from them one way or the other yet. I chose to draw on my IRA to have some funds available just in case neither unemployment nor SBA come through for me.”

Henderson said he has no other job to fall back on, but he is keeping an eye open for other opportunities. The 56-year-old entrepreneur says he’s worried about how long it will take the economy to revive and what will have changed when it does.

“Are bar/restaurant owners going to want to pay me to be there? Even if I bring in a crowd?” he asked. “I don't know how many accounts I have remaining after all of this.”

It’s been almost a month since Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered a statewide closure of all bars and restaurants in an effort to stop the COVID-19 coronavirus. Since then, thousands of Michigan restaurant owners have been confronted with a dilemma: how to preserve their livelihoods without an income and no end in sight.

Rick Wilson is one such example. Wilson and his wife have owned and operated Shamrock Bar in Jackson since May 2011, but the bar has been an icon of the town since it opened in 1941.

“It’s really the only Irish pub in Jackson,” Wilson told Michigan Capitol Confidential. “A lot of people call it their neighborhood bar. They grew up there and they remember coming in with their parents as kids. There’s a lot of history to it.”

But on March 16, Shamrock Bar was forced to close its doors on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, its biggest day of the year.

“We’ve been silenced,” Wilson said. “No customers, no sales, no revenue. I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even close to this.”

Wilson estimates that Shamrock can weather the closures caused by the pandemic for four months before he’d have to start dipping into the bar’s earnings and his personal savings. But, he said, many businesses aren’t so lucky.

“We’ve had a lot of support from the community and our business has grown a lot in the past few years,” he said, “but most businesses couldn’t last that long. I’ve heard of a couple in the area that are really struggling.”

His business has a host of fixed costs that don’t go away just because the bar is closed, Wilson noted. For Shamrock, those costs include the establishment’s seven employees, four of whom depend on their jobs at the bar for their living. Wilson said he hopes to keep them on his payroll by applying for the Paycheck Protection Plan, a loan program for small businesses that was included in the CARES act Congress passed last month.

“[The plan] allows you to bring your employees back to the workplace,” Wilson said. “I would open the bar just for takeout, but it would let me bring my employees back and off unemployment. I really believe we’d get a lot of support from the community.”

Wilson hopes that the governor will reopen restaurants in the coming months, even with strict social distancing guidelines. He predicts that his bar’s legal capacity of 50 to 60 people might be reduced to 20 or 30, for instance. In the meantime, he said he hopes to see less partisanship as Michigan tries to combat the crisis.

“It seems like there’s always a fight. This is not the time to have a battle and make things political,” Wilson said.