Dog Walkers Not Wanted: Her Job Evaporated When People Stayed Home

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Beverly Pickering Courtesy of Beverly Pickering

As a dog walker and pet sitter, Beverly Pickering relies on people not being home.

In fact, 70% of her business relies on people traveling. She's usually busiest during this time of the year — near Detroit, where she lives, lots of folks head out for spring break or to shake off their winter blues.

Instead, she's down to a few clients who are still paying her even though they don't need a dog walker. That, she says, is the thing that has kept her from panicking even as she's having flashbacks to the Great Recession, when she lost much of her retirement money.

FACES OF THE CORONAVIRUS RECESSION Jobs lost. Businesses in peril. Meetings gone virtual. Faces Of The Coronavirus Recession offers snapshots of working Americans whose lives have been upended by the pandemic.

"To go from working ... 16 hours a day to ... I worked two hours today. That's something I'm having a hard time adjusting to," Pickering says. "I'm trying to spend as much time outside as possible, because that's where I am all day normally ... spending time with these animals, who are so blissfully unaware of all of this. Everything that makes them happy still makes them happy."

In Pickering's garage, there's a stack of shingles she had bought to patch a little hole in her roof that occasionally leaks into a bucket underneath. But she had to cancel on the roofer — an unsuspecting victim of the travel decline.

"The shingles, trim, nails [are] just waiting for the day when they can come out of the dark and start their new life out in the sun ... just like us," Pickering says.

Read more stories in Faces Of The Coronavirus Recession.