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L.A. small businesses struggle to recover in wake of COVID-19, unrest

Yahoo Finance’s Melody Hahm joins Kristin Myers to discuss how the Los Angeles businesses are coping amid the coronavirus and civil unrest in the region.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, keeping our conversation inside of California, protests and looting have badly impacted businesses in Los Angeles that were already struggling after the coronavirus. And for that-- for more details, we have Melody Hahm. Hey, Melody. Great to see you.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, Kristin, and of course, the coronavirus is an ongoing pandemic. It is far from over. And Los Angeles, as you mentioned in your previous interview, has been a hotbed for new cases and hospitalizations. So just the looting that happened on Saturday night incited by initially peaceful protests and then these bad actors-- anarchists, as one small business owner told me on the phone just now-- have really ravaged businesses. Just thinking about the larger companies that were affected-- Nordstrom, of course, Apple-- a lot of these companies in The Grove, a popular shopping center were looted, were vandalized.

But I think being less talked about are the small businesses that were still closed on Saturday because of the coronavirus. I spoke with one vintage shop owner who has a shop on the La Brea, and many of the stores on that street in Mid-City were actually looted as well. She said about $50,000 to $60,000 worth of goods were stolen, and it was like an organized crime ring where there was one car that showed up right outside of the store. One person quickly went in with a sack, and then the following right after was another car. I've heard of being described almost as a McDonald's drive-thru sort of operation.

So just thinking about how these small businesses will recover from this guttural punch, not only from COVID but also the looting crisis, is something that people are still figuring out. The kind of emotion that we're hearing from these small business owners too is they don't even know if they can file a police report because police are too busy at the protests. Some are thinking of escalating it to the FBI. But ultimately, many of them are kind of echoing this experience that perhaps they don't think that any of these legal officers or officials or government members will be able to help them in the long run.

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