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Out of Dough Bakery owner Mark Effenberg said a week-long lockdown would have a major impact on local business. photograph tom gannon
SUPER BLOOD MOON PAGE 11
LIBRARIES CHANGE LIVES
LOCKDOWN WOES
LATROBE Valley businesses immediately felt the pinch from the current iteration of closures as Victoria’s new seven-day ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown took effect. The streets of Morwell were nearly deserted on Friday after the lockdown forced most stores to close and nonessential workers to transition back to working from home or not at all. The Cheap as Chips car park on
George St is usually full by lunchtime, but only had about five cars in it at noon on Friday. Businesses still in operation have been hit by the lockdown. Out of Dough Bakery owner Mark Effenberg said the lockdown had made an impact on business. “It’s pretty harsh, we’ve lost 50 per cent of our customers again so we’ll find it hard and battle on like most businesses in the market,” he said.
“It’s hard on everyone, the social clubs, the footy clubs, and businesses in general, we’re all feeling it.” Mr Effenberg said his business had already suffered some big losses as a result of event cancellations across the Valley. “We had all the footy clubs this weekend and they’ve all been cancelled so we’ve got thousands of dollars’ worth of pies sitting in fridges that we’ll have to try and use somewhere else or end up throwing them out,” he said.
Mr Effenberg doesn’t think he will make up for the money he’s currently lost and said any extension of the lockdown will result in even more losses. “We won’t recoup that, so it’s lost money because it’s a lost game, some of them we will never recoup and if it goes on longer then we lose our pie drives through the schools because we can’t deliver,” he said. Continued on page 4
PUZZLES, BRAIN STRAIN - IT’S TIME TO TAKE A BREAK: PAGE 6
SPORT COMES TO STANDSTILL VALLEY SPORT
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By TOM GANNON
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