“If in January 2020 you told me that in two months’ time my shop would be selling nothing but I’d be making over $100,000 on Etsy, I’d tell you, you were nuts,” Jenner told me. “I had never even heard of Etsy.”
Like Jenner, tens of thousands of store owners watched in horror as sales vanished. And for many, they never came back. During the first six months of the pandemic, U.S. e-commerce sales jumped 40.7%, while in-store revenue fell 2.7%.
It would be easy to brush that off as an acceleration of commerce’s relentless migration to the internet. But there’s much more to it than that. The line between in-store and online is blurring, driven in part by pivot-or-perish stories like Jenner’s helping to write the playbook for mom-and-pop success in the post-pandemic era.
Aimee Picchi
Special to USA TODAY
Emergency room nurse Louise McLellan recalls her life prior to contracting COVID-19 in March: She liked to kayak with her husband and make her signature cookie – the peanut butter explosion – to bring to work the next day.
Ten months later, McLellan, 53, still hasn’t fully recovered. She struggles to bake, and kayaking is out of the question because of lingering lung problems that leave her out of breath. That made it difficult to perform her job when she tried returning to work in June.
“I lasted two hours,” she recalls.
The physical demands of an emergency room nurse were too taxing to given her long-haul symptoms, she says. And when she asked to switch to a desk job, her efforts went nowhere. In the end, McLellan went on short-term disability.