We continue to see that one of the side effects of the pandemic in communities the size of Marshalltown and smaller is the loss of retail options. George Johnson, a business professor at Marshalltown Community College, says 110,00 have closed at least on a short-term basis…and 55 percent of those will not open again. 40 million jobs have been sidelined, 16 million of them will never come back. While the coronavirus has hit a lot of businesses, some are doing better than others.

The shrinking of retail seems to be striking minority businesses especially hard. Johnson says there are two reasons, one is that minority owners tend to not have as much equity built up in their business. The other is that minorities have been hit harder by the coronavirus.