Lakeside shops find their way through pandemic

With Henrico County joining much of the Commonwealth and entering the third phase of the state’s reopening plan on July 1, many store owners and shoppers are eager to resume business. Yet even during in the worst weeks of the quarantine, dozens of shops and small businesses along Lakeside Avenue have been open for the duration. For area residents, this has made Lakeside a source of normality, and for the business owners with shops here, it’s given them something all too rare as the economy has faltered: stability.

This is particularly evident at the Lakeside Farmers’ Market, which has continued to draw local farmers and customers for the past three months. Despite some small changes and several precautions, the market – owned and operated for the past 13 years by Peter Francisco and his wife Sharon – has been doing brisk business.

“We open at nine instead of eight, we’ve got ropes set up and hand sanitizer out, and we’ve been very strict on masking,” Peter Francisco said. “Some of our vendors, the ones who sell ‘non-essential’ wares, we’ve had to end that for this season, but all of our produce and food vendors, some of whom have been here since we started, they’ve been here with us for the duration. We’ve done what we can to make this work while keeping everybody safe.”

That the farmers’ market was open at all was critically important for the many farmers and vendors, especially with other markets making the choice to close for the duration of quarantine measures.

According to Brittney Rudolph, one of the operators of Deer Run Farms in King William County, for small farms like theirs and others like it, having a place to sell produce as it comes is critical to keeping them running.

“Farmers markets haven’t been given the same amount of leeway as grocery stores, a lot of them have closed, and that has affected business,” Rudolph said. “For farms like ours, where we sell a lot of our produce as they come out of the ground, we depend on getting it to market, and COVID-19, and these closures, has certainly impacted our business.”

That the Lakeside Farmers’ Market has been open, and has worked with vendors to make it a safe place to do business, is just another reason why Deer Run Farms has been a vendor at the market for all 13 years that it’s been operating.

“This is a great marketplace, with the covered pavilion and plenty of parking, and they have done a good job taking measures to keep everyone safe,” Rudolph said. “We have taken some measures of our own as well, we have separate employees handle the money and the produce, and after a small drop early on, foot traffic has been increasing here week by week.”

Both Peter and Sharon Francisco also have noticed the uptick in business over the past several weeks, as not only regular customers began returning but new customers have kept coming back. With summer now underway, they’re even presenting live music at the market on Saturdays.

“We’ve drawn nice crowds each week, it seems people like having an alternative to the big grocery stores,” Sharon Francisco said. “A lot of people say they feel safer coming here, since it’s less crowded and it’s open air, and less hands have handled the produce here.

“We are trying our best to accommodate everything, keeping our customers and vendors safe, it’s a challenging season, but we’re hanging in here.”

Lakeside’s business community includes mostly family-owned shops, and there’s a nimbleness that works to its favor, Peter Francisco said.

“Lakeside is home to more than 100 independently owned businesses, one of the last strongholds of small business in Richmond, and a lot of them have been here for decades,” he said. “They can’t afford to be shut down for weeks at a time, but one of the advantages a small business has is they are more able to adapt, and here in Lakeside, and we’ve always been able to count on the community as well.”

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Melvin Major, who has been operating the Fin and Feather pet store on the opposite end Lakeside Avenue since 1963, said he has never seen anything quite like the shutdown from COVID-19.

“As a child, I remember the polio epidemics, but nothing like this pandemic – certainly not when it comes to its impact on business,” Major said. “That first couple of weeks were rough, but as people stayed home, they wanted more things for their pets, and things started to pick back up.”

Like most pet stores, Fin and Feather was considered an essential business, which has allowed for some greater flexibility, but Major made sure the store still look necessary precautions. In terms of business, times have been worse – like many business owners on Lakeside Avenue, Major has painful memories of the 2008 market crash. As things settled down, business began to return and even picked up.

“One of the good things about a pet store is, good times or bad times, people are always going to take care of their pets,” Major said. “Arguably more so now, with so many people staying home, they want more to do with their pets, so there is more interest in picking up things for their pets, or getting new pets.”

Meanwhile, every “non-essential” shop alongside Lakeside Avenue has made some small changes to how it has operated during the past three months. For restaurants and brewpubs like Final Gravity Brewing Company, it’s meant a shift to curbside pickup and takeout. For specialty stores like Collector’s Heaven, it’s meant that the store’s popular game nights have been put on hold. Others, such as RVA Antiques, have placed greater attention on online sales.

“We’ve been very careful to follow the governor’s guidelines ever since the beginning and we’ve made sure all of our in-person customers are wearing masks,” said owner Dean Lewis. “About 70 percent of our business has been online though, so it was very easy to put a bigger emphasis on e-commerce, and we’ve been very happy with some of the results we’ve seen from that.”

According to Lewis, RVA Antique’s sales numbers for April and May were actually record-breaking, something he attributes to both more people staying at home, and a growing shift to support local business.

“Almost 9 out of 10 people have been at home for this, so there has been a lot of pent up energy, and people want to spend money and support small businesses where they can,” Lewis said. “More than that though, people want to feel connected, and you can get that much more here in Lakeside, than you can at Short Pump mall or from a Wal-Mart, and we do not take that support for granted.”

That sense of community, and a desire to seek it out, especially in uncertain times, is part of what makes Lakeside what it is to many shop owners.

“People need that sense of community right now, and that’s something we’ve always had here in Lakeside, [it] has been for years,” Major said. “My family has been here for decades, since the 1920s. Now we have younger families moving in, some businesses changing, but that sense of community in Lakeside, that’s here to stay.”

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On Fin and Feather’s end of Lakeside Avenue, near the city of Richmond line, longtime neighborhood staple Roy’s Big Burger has been almost perfectly suited for these new times. The order window now doubles as a sneeze shield, its outdoor seats already were six feet apart, and the biggest change is that lines of customers are now wearing the ubiquitous masks.

Yet for long-time customers like Innsbrook resident Daniel Rhodes, Roy’s Big Burger – and Lakeside as a whole – has become a source of stability in a time seemingly defined by instability.

“I grew up here in Lakeside, I came here all the time as a kid, I still came for lunch maybe once a month,” said Rhodes. “Now I find myself coming a couple times a week. With the virus, the economy, and Richmond on fire, it’s nice to have something familiar, you know?”

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