The Reopening of Boca’s Nonessential Businesses
Palm Beach County moves further into reopening as many nonessential businesses continue their reopening procedures.
Movie Theaters
Cinemark Palace 20 located on Airport Road is set to reopen its doors on July 17. Regal Shadowood located on Glades Road closed on March 17 but select locations are set to begin reopening on July 10. IPIC Theaters located on Plaza Real will remain closed as other theaters around the nation begin to reopen.
All of these theaters have strict guidelines to follow before and during reopening ensuring the safety of guests and employees alike.
Many of the precautions to be expected are social distancing, masks and temperature checks upon entrance, increased sanitation and self-service condiment centers to be closed. Temperature checks for guests will not be conducted at Regal locations.
Auditorium capacities will be capped at 50% with seats required between different parties attending a showing.
Cinemark will be utilizing new “high-efficiency filters equipped with HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filters identified to be effective in trapping at least 99.97 percent of microscopic particles, including COVID-19,” according to their website.
IPIC will enforce limited hours for their locations, Thursday through Sunday, to deeply sanitize all surfaces and equipment.
Few movies will be available in theaters when reopening occurs. Tenet and Mulan were two showings that theaters were planning, yet Tenet pushed back their debut from July to August.
Employees at AMC now question the plan to reopen as corporate made cuts to the managerial team across the nation in an effort to save money.
Gyms and Fitness Centers
PurLife Fitness Center, located on Plaza Real South, reopened on May 18 and is currently operating at 50% capacity.
The club has remodeled its operational hours to ensure proper sanitization throughout the day with fitness classes allowing 10 members at a time.
Youfit Health Clubs, on Glades Road, is following similar measures as they enforce social distancing between equipment at the gym.
Employees of both Youfit and PurLife will be wearing Personal Protective Equipment, but facial coverings are not required to gain access to either gym.
For PurLife, guests will be required to have temperature checks upon each visit and members that have above a 100.4-degree temperature will be denied admission. To aid those more at risk for COVID-19, PurLife will offer their gym to be opened from 1:00-2:00pm for members 50 years and older.
Information about memberships and refunds can be found at each gym’s respective website for those who do not want to return to the gym setting yet.
Bars and Restaurants
Business for bars and restaurants now open for dine-in across Boca have seen a sharp decline in business due to a decreased capacity being allowed.
Erik Brinkmann, manager of Biergarten located on Via De Palmas, said their locally owned location reopened on May 15.
“Everybody’s back to work which is our main goal, to get our employees back to work as quick as possible,” Brinkmann said. “We’re thankful that they’re able to get back to work and make money so they can pay their bills and feed their families. That was a really big thing for us.”
Brinkmann notes their location is visited by a code enforcer daily to ensure compliance with new sanitization and social distance policies.
Vice Mayor of Palm Beach County, Robert Weinroth, said the motivation to reopen businesses throughout the county comes from a desire to stimulate the economy and to lessen the hardships on businesses and residents alike.
Throughout Boca Raton these reopened restaurants and bars are not recovering at a rapid rate due to decreased capacity restrictions in place.
Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist expects our economy to recover due to a lack of underlying issues in our economy that were seen in 2008 or with The Great Recession.
“I was more hopeful a month ago than I am now,” Krugman said. “But if the virus is still out there, that sets the stage for recovery only if you get the infection down to a low level, and then you have testing, tracing and isolating, as in South Korea. We seem to be receding from that goal. We could be getting it under control, but we don’t seem to be.”
Weinroth also noted that we will never go back to “the pre-Phase One regime”, or a complete shutdown of all nonessential businesses.
