Normally, the so-called Latiner quarter in the city centre of Aarhus with its many bars and restaurants is well visited. At the time of the Corona crisis with currently 1,044 infected people in the country (18.03.20), however, only a few courageous people dare to enter the city centre. Nick Olesen is the manager of the bar “Mig & Ølsnedkeren” and tries to reduce the financial losses by means of a street sale. An interview.
By Caroline Kleine-Besten
How did the idea for a street sale come up?
“The idea to do a door sell bottle shop popped into our minds because we need to still be able to make some money to pay the workers salaries and the rent, insurances and so on. It was kind of out of desperation. “
When did you start doing that?
“We started out slowly on Friday last week. We closed down Wednesday evening so we had some space to figure it out and we started out slowly 3 hours on the Friday, made a bit of money, 7 hours on Saturday and then we did 5 hours on Monday and Tuesday. It is not the same revenue bit it is keeping a bit of money in our pockets but it can not be compared to our usual business.”
Will the offer be accepted by the people?
“So I think a lot of people, a lot of our regular customers they reacted very positively to that we chose to shut down immediately, we got a lot of love from Social Media, Facebook and Instagram.
“[…] it is amazing to see how caring our regular customers are, they come by, some of them more than once a day and people are passing by on the streets. I think it is a great idea, have a distance chat and buy some beers.”
How do you manage the sale to avoid the risk of infection?
“We have made a table that is designed to keep people out and us inside, so I place the beers on that and I use disposable gloves and a lot of this sanitizer spray, so that is basically how we do it. As little contact as possible.”
Do you want to keep running this business until you can open up again?
“Yeah, if we are allowed to do that by the government than we will keep on doing this because it can help us keep going and not go out of business because we are s small independent business we don’t have huge saving accounts or anything so whatever we can do to keep things rolling we will within what is morally right.”
The interview took place over a safety distance of more than 1.5 m and thus also brought a new journalistic experience for me.