Main Street America, a network of 1,600 commercial districts covering 300,000 small businesses, has conducted a survey offering some sobering statistics on the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
The group reached out to 6,000 small business owners about their economic prospects for the coming months. After extrapolating the data, it found that a significant number of businesses are under threat of closing across the U.S.
"We're looking at potentially 7.5 million businesses closing over the next five months, absent some pretty significant intervention to help support those businesses," Main Street America CEO Patrice Frey told Cheddar.
This could cause 35 million job losses in the small business sector alone over the same period, according to Frey, and this is limited to companies with 20 or fewer employees.
She added that impact was spread across industries and across the rural and urban divide.
"I will say the food industry was a little more hard-hit than others," she said.
Her organization is making the case that more robust federal support is needed to stop this fallout, including additional funding for the Small Business Administration, which saw its share of the federal stimulus quickly eaten up by businesses in need of loans.
"The funding needs to be replenished and it needs to be replenished immediately and at a scale that is actually going to enable the business that need the resources to get them," Frey said. "We were extraordinarily disappointed to see that larger business absorbed the lion's share of the first round. That left many small businesses in a lurch. We're hopeful that those truly small businesses will be able to make it into this second round."
