Jeffrey Bell - Eleven Eleven
MARCH 18, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
“I’m grateful that we decided to open a wine shop and wine bar in one because we can continue to be open as a retail space…we haven’t lost all business because of it.
I’m Fuck’n worried about everything man, I can’t sleep. I mean, we’re new and if we had been established for several years or even a year or more it would be a lot different situation. We just came off of 4 months ago just opening, spending a lot of money to get open. You know there’s not a lot of money left to make up a bunch of downtown but we’re doing everything we can. We’re going to start delivering tomorrow, I’ve got a strong wine club going that has been very supportive so, you know we’re not quit’n or anything it’s just a different direction.
WHAT CAN THE COMMUNITY DO TO HELP YOU?
Come buy some wine, I mean that’s basically it. I mean everybody needs wine to get through certain situations and things, I know it’s not just wine or spirits, beer or booze in general. It’s hard to have no community anymore and at the very least, if you can’t come and have the comradery and companionship of sitting in a place with people that you know, or just meeting, you can still come in small groups and visit and take something home with you. I don’t know, I expect a lot of people will use more individual social media. I use this app with my family called Marco Polo which is great because I can send video messages to all the members of my family all over the country and we can respond to each other, I think we will see a lot more of that going on. My concern is we’re going to lose a sense of community. Benson is a community, people are interlinked and intertwined…I don’t have anything to eat…I eat at these places all the time and it’s all shut now.
I don’t know, there’s a lot to process all the time. I come up with thoughts in the middle of the night and I wake up and I can’t go back to sleep, and then about the time that I really need to get back up and start doing stuff my body is like “okay get back to sleep now”.
I’ve been in the service industry for so long and up until we started doing this I was working for a big chain of grocery stores and everybody that works for me here…I’ve had to lay off. Every one of them had a job but they were all at another bar or restaurant so they all lost their jobs at the same time and no one is hiring in any line. I would say if you do have a job right now, don’t quit. My girlfriend works for a company downtown who sent everybody home except for her and she has to sit in this big space at a desk by herself and she hates it because there’s nobody else there and there’s nothing to do. But she has to deal with it, keep her job because she’s not gonna find another one around.
It’s hard especially for the people in the service industry. I don’t want to see this but…Omaha is an incredibly restaurant heavy town and for all of them to be shut and all of their employees to be laid off at the same time, I think there’s a lot of them that aren’t going to re-open. And what we as people in this business run into as a major problem because we have so many bars and restaurants is that we have a lack of a talent pool to draw from, suppose the businesses that do survive will have more to draw from, but from what I use to think was a problem its now a tragedy. It’s a completely different situation when everything was so different four days ago.
I would say to anyone in the service industry; if at all you have the financial means stay strong and hope it passes because the opposite side of this might be really prolific because so many people that have been cooped up for weeks are gonna be like “I’m going out” and its’ gonna be a lot of business on the other side.”
