How a Small Bar Battled to Survive the Coronavirus

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode contains strong language. Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The New York Times, moved to Oakland, Calif., five years ago. When he arrived, he set out to find a bar of choice. It quickly became the Hatch. Unpretentious, cheap and relaxed, the Hatch was a successful small business until the coronavirus hit. After the announcement in March that California would order bars and restaurants to shut down, Jack decided to follow the fortunes of the Hatch. Over six months, he charted the struggle to keep the tavern afloat and the hardship suffered by its staff. “I can’t afford to be down in the dumps about it,” Louwenda Kachingwe, the Hatch’s owner, told Jack as he struggled to come up with ideas to keep the bar running during the shutdown. “I have to be proactive, because literally people are depending on it.” Guest: Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Here’s the full story of the Oakland tavern and its staff as they try to weather the fallout from the pandemic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the Daily.
0:09.4	Across the country, nearly 100,000 small businesses have now shut down permanently because of the
0:16.4	pandemic. Federal relief funding has stalled, and yet some cities are now preparing for a second
0:24.0	round of shutdowns. Today, for the past six months, my colleague, Jack Niggas, has been
0:34.0	documenting the experience of a single neighborhood bar in the Bay Area of California to understand
0:41.1	the consequences for its owner, bartender, and cleaner.
0:54.8	It's Tuesday, October 6th.
0:57.4	Jack, tell me about Batch.
1:08.8	So the Hatch is the classic neighborhood bar. I moved to Oakland in late 2015, and one of the first
1:16.8	things you do when you move to a new city is you find your local dive bar, at least if you're me,
1:22.0	and pretty quickly I knew it would be the Hatch. It's just a really perfect neighborhood bar,
1:29.6	in my view. It's unpretentious, relaxed, the beer is cheap, you can always find a seat,
1:35.4	and I ended up just spending a lot of time there. My friends and I would gather around,
1:40.9	uneven tables upstairs, and spend long nights talking until close, and we'd watch the NBA playoffs
1:48.0	on a bed sheet that hung from the ceiling, and we just, we made it our place.
1:58.0	Good morning. Thank you for joining us here on Mornings on 2. It is Tuesday, March 17th,
2:03.3	bars, nightclubs, and restaurants closed amidst the bomb. So when the pandemic hit,
2:06.9	and I realized that small businesses across the country were going to close, my mind went to the
2:12.7	Hatch, and I decided, let me follow this place for a few months and see what happens.
2:18.8	And so I check in on the Hatch on March 17th. This is the day after Gavin Newsom,
2:24.0	California's governor has ordered the state's bars and restaurants to close.
2:28.0	So, yeah, why don't we just do one of our work by the way?
	...

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