Mick Ridgway - Fauxmaha

MARCH 20, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.

"So far, it has changed business a lot but we’re still rolling, still doing the same thing we’ve always done. I mean aside from doing strictly curbside, it hasn’t changed a whole lot luckily for us. But maybe that’s because we’ve always kind of kept it as a pretty small operation What’s it like meeting your customers curbside?

Everyone’s been in a good mood, people are excited to be here, excited to support the business.

I’m sitting here thinking mostly about my employees, cause I’m already used to not really having money you know? As an owner of a newer business, I’ve kind of made my lifestyle based on making it work over the last ten years, trying new things, not really caring about the money part to much. So I’ve just mostly got to be here for my people you know? This is a very small knit place where you have 5,6 people working here with me…all my friends, so you know they’ve always had my back since day one here and I do everything I can to have their back also. I’m grateful that people are still coming out and letting us still do this because if people were staying completely at home, not coming out whatsoever, we wouldn’t even be able to do this, we would have to close down.

I’m worried about if it gets to the point where it has to shut down completely.

There’s a lot going on, I’m especially feeling bad about Omaha in general. A lot of places are closed, a lot of people are out of a job right now, yeah there’s certainly guilt associated with us being able to kind of keep going, because not every place has that going for them right now.

I think that once this passes we will all kind of have a greater appreciation for a lot of things, we’re all seeing things new for the first time.

Providing some comfort for people during this time is kind of why I've been here since day one. That’s why I wanted to start my own food business when I was younger. I like to provide food for people that don’t want to eat certain things. That’s exactly how I've been so it’s like I’m doing it for people like me.

There are some people that have been coming in that have been very, very, nice, throwing us pretty crazy tips, buying big gift cards, just to make sure we’re getting something here. That’s stuff we won’t forget, we remember those things. It’s happened quite a few times, it’s really surprising.

We’re all thinking of them. We all have friends or family that are all very much affected by this situation and there are always things we can do, but it can be tricky you know, but we’re thinking about all of them.

Right now I’m in a spot of just being very grateful, if things were different for me I would be very angry. I think this situation has shown our government, our politicians, us as people are just not prepared for this really, we should be…it kind of shows how vulnerable we are and things need to be addressed for sure."