Jan. 11, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
04:56
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| raised her voice against Governor Newsom's irrational ban on outdoor dining. And now she is suing him. Angela Marsden is her name. | |
| Angela, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. | |
| Hi, Dennis. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| Why don't you briefly recount what happened with you? | |
| World away. | |
| It was two days before Thanksgiving here in Los Angeles, in California, the governor announced that, I still get emotional recounting it, that he was going to shut down outdoor dining. | |
| Not very many of us actually survived to get to outdoor dining, but the ones of us that did worked very, very hard and spent Money we did not have in order to do outdoor dining, and actually in October, it was the first month I saw a profit. | |
| I was getting ready to hire three new employees because we were so busy, things were going so well, and we followed all the protocols. | |
| You know, our tables were more than seven feet apart. | |
| We wore gloves, we wore shields, we sanitized. | |
| I have a mix of older and younger clients, so obviously I would do anything I could to keep my community safe and my clients safe, the older ones. | |
| So I was very plexiglass everywhere. | |
| I did everything I could and spent a lot of extra money to do it. | |
| So October went very well. | |
| I was excited. | |
| And then two days before Thanksgiving, which is one of the biggest dining days of the year. | |
| We were told we had to close the day before, the night before Thanksgiving. | |
| At that point, for me, I had already done to-go. | |
| Actually, when we did the to-go in the beginning, we fed the hospitals. | |
| We did everything we could. | |
| We still were losing money every month. | |
| But when this happened... | |
| I was already, you know, running out of the loan money that I took from the small business loan that I have to pay back. | |
| And I sat down with my bookkeeper and he said, I think this is going to go on until February or March and we can't do to go this time around because we lose too much money. | |
| So I had to tell my staff basically two days before Thanksgiving and before the holidays that they were furloughed and did not have a job. | |
| Most of my staff... | |
| We're newer, had been lost one or two other jobs, and we're thankful just to have the job that they had. | |
| Some of them had been with me a while, and their unemployment was running out. | |
| I remember my right-hand girl, my manager, Lindsay, just started crying, and she just said, I'm so scared. | |
| And, you know, I put on a good face and called my mom back in Indiana where I'm from, and she's like, just come home, you know, come home, forget L.A., walk away from it. | |
| I said, well, I'll come home on vacation. | |
| And it was about two days later. | |
| I was in the mall. | |
| I was depressed, obviously, after Thanksgiving. | |
| You know, furloughing my employees. | |
| I said, come back the following Friday. | |
| You'll get your check because we have a bi-weekly payroll. | |
| And it was the Friday before that that I decided I should go shopping because I was going to go home for a couple weeks. | |
| In December. | |
| And I was very, very depressed. | |
| And I thought it would help. | |
| To my surprise, the mall was open. | |
| So I went to the mall. | |
| Black Friday. | |
| And no gloves. | |
| No face shields. | |
| Trying on whatever clothes I wanted. | |
| I just got more and more upset. | |
| And I called my mom and I said, you know, I've been in L.A. almost 28 years. | |
| It's beautiful. | |
| It's a beautiful city. | |
| And I can't just run away like everybody else, Mom. | |
| I can't do it. | |
| And I've got to start speaking out because as a business owner, we're afraid to tell people how bad it is because we're afraid they'll think that we don't believe in COVID or that we don't care about them. | |
| We're afraid of the repercussions. | |
| We are embarrassed. | |
| It's very demoralizing what we've been through. | |
| So, you know, you kind of quietly die and go away. | |
| But I couldn't do it. | |
| So I got on Facebook and I just said, I can't believe Black Friday, the mall's open, and they had to shut us down right before Thanksgiving. | |
| And I had then found my voice as far as, I'm no longer going to care and I'm no longer going to be afraid. | |
| The truth has to be told. | |
| And I'm not going to run like everybody else is. |
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