For some mom-and-pop shops, the coronavirus could prove to be the end.

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

USA TODAY, Wochit

There was half a day left before everything shut down at midnight, before everything deemed unessential was put into limbo by order of the state. And for many of Detroit’s mom-and-pop businesses, already hanging on by a thread even in good times, this mandated closure looked to be disastrous.

“Oh yeah, it’s gonna be real bad,” said Larry Robinson, 70, the owner of God’s World Superstore on West Seven Mile near Schaefer.

“Catastrophic,” said Maurice Ervin, his 40-year-old godson.

Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

The two men were behind the counter on the store’s sudden last day. It was Tuesday, March 23, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had just announced a "stay home, stay safe" order meant to try halting the rapidly escalating spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Michigan. That meant that except for essential businesses such as grocery stores, gas stations and hospitals, just about everything else had to close for at least three weeks -- including a little Bible store on Detroit’s west side.

Neither man knew if anyone would be coming in for last-minute prayer books or anointing oil. Neither knew when or if the two of them would be back at work, or even if the store could survive this.

“We put God first and everything, but it’s going to be tight,” Robinson said. “It’s going to be really tight.”

God’s World has been around for four decades, and in this building for more than 30 years. The large, two-room store was filled with Bibles, inspirational books, usher and deacon badges, calendars, CDs, and even a couple boxes of gospel music record albums from the ‘70s and ‘80s, the height of the store’s music sales.

“Back in the day when we first started, music was huge, so we had customers from 8 to 80 years old – we were selling albums, selling CDs, selling cassettes. But now 99 percent of the younger people are going to go online or download them, so now it’s mostly middle-aged and older churchgoers. Some of the older people still like to have them, though.” But these days the CDs sell for just $5, and nobody’s asking for cassettes. The store’s had to transition away from music, a tough adjustment even in good times.

“Now this comes along, so it’s been a little tough,” Robinson said of the coronavirus. “It’s not like we have money saved up. We got a little money that will probably be gone by then, and the bills will be backing up, and we’ll miss all this money.”

He paused and smiled. “But I’m not complaining.”

Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

This is normally one of the busiest times of the year at God’s World, right before Passover and Easter. “We really depend on those last-minute shoppers, and now we’re going to miss those sales,” Ervin said.

Over the past two weeks the two men watched as city and state officials shut the city down in waves. First they wouldn't let people eat inside the restaurants or drink inside the bars, but that made sense to them. Then they closed the schools, and they understood. But to them, when they first shut the churches, that might’ve gone too far.

“For a large amount of people, that’s your inspiration,” Robinson said. “That’s what you lean on to help you through the tough times.” Why, he wondered, couldn’t the churches be allowed to hold several more services with fewer worshipers at each, with everyone spaced out in the pews for safety? At such an anxious time, this closure left a lot of people without an anchor. For many people, churches are an essential service.

“When you take hope away from people, whatever that hope is, that’s tough,” he added.

Now they’re closing his store, one of those few niche businesses that fell through the cracks of the mandated closures of the past weeks, an odd assortment of unique places that weren’t deemed part of critical infrastructure such as public health, public safety, food and gas, but also weren’t crowded public spaces like barber shops and churches. They’d existed for a week or so in a surreal middle ground, and now that space was closing. But Robinson had faith that things would somehow work out.

“I think it’s going to be OK, because people are kind of using common sense,” Robinson said. “It’s like, OK, let’s kind of work together instead of everybody just kind of going their separate ways. I think the majority of people are like that. And I think it’s going to be all right.”

***

Michael Banks was handling the stay-at-home order about as best as a small business owner could.

“Well, everybody’s got to be as helpful as possible,” said the 69-year-old owner of Professional Racquet Services on Livernois, just north of West Seven Mile. Besides, as life in the state slowly ground to a halt over the past two weeks, so did his foot traffic. “With everybody shut down, nobody’s coming in here buying tennis equipment.”

Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

It’s hard enough to run a small business. For him and his neighbors on the Avenue of Fashion, as the stretch of Livernois roughly between McNichols and 8 Mile road is called, it’s been twice as tough. Last year the city tore up and rebuilt Livernois Avenue and its sidewalks for the second time in 15 years, bringing business to a near complete halt for months. “I didn’t get nearly as much business during the summertime as I normally would have, and that money would be paying for whatever I need right now,” he said.

Now out of nowhere comes a pandemic that’s shut everything down yet again. Only this time, it’s even worse, since people can’t choose to park at a distance and walk to his door. He’s down to zero business again.

“I might’ve ordered some things in November or December that are supposed to be coming in March or April, and a lot of the companies are calling me and saying, ‘You know, with everything that’s happening, do you really want us to ship it?’ And then I say no. So they’re going to call me back in June.”

His store began 37 years ago because of a long-ago girlfriend. "She said, ‘You at home too much. My boyfriend’s got to have his own business.’" The lifelong tennis player began restringing tennis rackets in a room of their house, then his girlfriend found him a building for lease on the high-traffic Avenue of Fashion, where he was a peculiar anomaly among the clothing stores and boutiques, a quick stop for the tennis players using the courts at nearby Palmer Park. He filled the store with bags and balls and shoes, and racquets for tennis, squash, badminton and pickleball.

Nowadays, though, just about everything he sells is available online elsewhere, or at chain sporting goods stores throughout the region. But when those online-bought tennis racquets break, he’s one of the few people left who knows how to restring them. That, he said, is how he’s stayed in business through it all. Hopefully that would be enough to bring him back out of this forced hibernation.

Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press

His phone was on his hip, and he kept checking it as he talked. “I’m waiting on my wife,” he said. She works on a ward desk at a local hospital, where she sees the effects of the coronavirus first hand. “She said she’s on the floor with the disease, and she said it’s kind of shaky there. Everybody’s nervous. They haven’t given her a mask yet. They’re talking about giving her a mask in two days. The governor shut everyone down, but she still has to go to work because it’s a hospital.”

He looked up at the TV, which hung atop a fridge, showing reruns of daytime shows that stopped production weeks ago. At this point it just served as noise to break up the silence of the day as he waited for his wife’s call or for a last-minute tennis shopper. That TV might be the first casualty of the shutdown at his store.

“I’m getting ready to cut off DIRECTV because they’re running reruns on everything,” he said, frowning. He can’t even watch sports anymore, the final insult of all this sudden change. “I got the Tennis Channel and they’re running reruns on there, too! I’m ready to cut them off.”

***

Javari Tinnon didn’t need a governor’s order to shut down. He was about to do it anyway.

“Just due to super slow business,” said the 40-year-old owner of Hardware Express on Grand River, near the Southfield Freeway, in the Grandmont/Rosedale Park neighborhood. “It’s not even worth being open right now. Within the past seven days it’s been an absolute cliff dive as far as customers coming in. And I’m doing it just for the protection of myself and my employees.”

Those employees are his 68-year-old father, who still goes out on window-repair calls; and Shirree Broaden, 42, standing soft-spoken behind the counter, who fills in when Tinnon is at his other full-time job on the assembly line at Ford in Dearborn. “I work 84 hours a week,” he said. “Forty there and 44 here.”

John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press

It was quiet in the shop as he stood in the narrow aisles, which were absolutely crammed with thousands of tools, parts, hardware, pipes, filters, screws, nails, fittings, fixtures and filters, plus innumerable other things. The neighborhood around here is full of old homes, many with fixtures and appliances whose parts aren’t made anymore. So Tinnon makes a point of stocking those old items, often going to estate sales to find some rare part to stock in his store for the residents living nearby.

This is not Home Depot or Lowe’s. And that, he said, is how he survives.

“I can’t compete with them in prices, but my services that I offer, that definitely is what they don’t do,” Tinnon said. “I do a whole lot of stuff that they don’t. I cut glass, I cut wood, I cut blinds, I do small engine repairs, I do windows, I do gas lines, so all of that keeps me afloat.”

Tinnon became a hardware store owner eight years ago because for years his father was a hardware store owner, and he wanted to follow his dad’s lead. He bought an old dry cleaner’s building and slowly stocked it with tools he got at going-out-of-business sales at other mom-and-pop hardware stores that died off in the face of big box competition.

Before business here dropped as the number of the state’s coronavirus cases rose, there was a brief rush of people searching for face masks and rubber gloves and disinfectant. But that brings in only so much money, and soon that wave passed.

Now, on this last day, there was one final surge of customers.

Two old-timers walked in together. “We need a faucet expert,” one of them announced, and handed a large, obsolete faucet cartridge to Tinnon, who searched on a wall for its replacement; then grabbed a ladder to climb and look even higher; then brought the cartridge behind the counter with him, where he took it completely apart, replaced the seats, the springs and three rubber rings, put it back together and charged them $5.

Two more older guys came in together. “We need some brass gaskets.” They were in and out in two minutes after Broaden quickly found their part on the wall. She’s still learning where everything is, but she’s gotten much better.

“I don’t have sections,” Tinnon explained. “I know the whole store like the back of my hand, so when you come in here I can get you in and out in five to 10 minutes. For some people time is money.” Sometimes, if she can’t find something, Broaden calls Tinnon at work, and he FaceTimes her from his spot on the factory floor and guides her to the right place in the correct aisle of the hardware store.

“Have a good day,” she said, sweetly, as the men turned to leave.

“That’s the only kind of day to have,” one of them replied.

“You’re right about that!” she said.

The chime on the door rang over and over as people flocked here for their last-minute things. Nobody wore masks or gloves, as people were doing in the supermarkets around town. Until the order came to shut down, the only sign that life was now very different was the giant bottle of hand sanitizer by the register, which Tinnon and Broaden frequently used.

Another older gentleman from the neighborhood walked in. “Could I just get a couple of license plate screws?” Tinnon fished into a bag and handed him some. No charge. He did the same thing for the next customer, who coincidentally came in looking for some screws for a light. Again, no charge.

Because this is not Home Depot or Lowe’s.

“If my community comes in and I can’t spare four screws what I am here for?” Tinnon asked. “For me that’s advertising. And that will make him think of me and tell somebody about me in a heartbeat.”

It was just about time to close for the day, and for who knows how long. His job at Ford was already on hold, and now too was the hardware store. Everything was about to fall into a deep sleep with no known end in sight. The big box hardware stores would get through this just fine. But for a small, family-owned hardware store like this, it would be much harder to get through this unharmed. And he was worried about the store he’d done so much to build.

“But I live in faith,” he said. “I can’t let what’s going on in the world change my scope of how I view things. I can’t let it deter me from being who I am or living how I’m supposed to be living and working. But it’s going to work out. It’s going to work out regardless.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep

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Small business owners face uncertainty with shutdown