Emily Otto has been fielding a lot of calls in the past two months from a loyal clientele she’s built up over 20 years. And she has had to tell them all the same thing: She’d love to help, but her hands are tied.
"I’m devastated,” says Otto. "I’m getting calls from customers, and they need me. But I cannot physically help them. It pains me to know that my people are also in pain.”
Or, more precisely, her people’s pups.
Otto, 38, is a dog groomer. A couple of years ago she bought Enchanted Tails on Hancock Street in Lansdale, where she’d worked for 16 years,
and renamed it Handcrafted Canine. The client base she’d built over decades stayed with her. She was booked months in advance, never advertised. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Grooming was not deemed an essential business in Pennsylvania, and she was forced to shutter her salon.
And, like many other small, independent operations in every industry in the past few months, she found rules that seemed arbitrary and unevenly applied, appeals processes that led to dead ends, and an alphabet soup of support programs for small businesses and unemployed individuals that ultimately offered no aid.
"I’ve been grooming for so long,” says Otto, who lives in the Lehigh Valley. "I’ve had some customers reach out, just because they knew what was going on, and they felt so bad and gifted me money for my business to stay open. Thank God for them, they’re saving me. I was denied unemployment. I’ve gone eight weeks with no income at all.”
She’s taken a few small part-time jobs, "just to put food on the table” — and to feed her own dog. "I’m not just sitting her idle-handed.”
Suffering is widespread these days, but pet-grooming enterprises may be particularly hard hit. Many are small shops. Overhead costs can run high — Otto estimates her fixed costs run $2,500 a month, "and those bills still have to be paid.”
"People aren’t aware that it’s a growing cottage industry,” says Liz Sines, a Doylestown-area master groomer who is helping form a nonprofit
Pennsylvania Professional Pet Groomers Coalition to support and advocate for groomers.
"Especially with mobile groomers or people who have small shops on their properties, a lot of them are single parents and young parents who need flexibility in their schedule, and they’re living paycheck to paycheck and working really hard," says Sines. "And they really have been left out in the cold.”
News reports and governmental officials, Sines says, "have left us out of the equation. Many states have allowed groomers to continue through this COVID-19 shutdown.”
And, like Walmart and Target versus mom-and-pop shops, Pennsylvania considers the larger big-box pet shops essential services, and they remain open. Otto says she has heard from her clients that some of those shops have continued their pet-grooming operations into the mandatory shutdown.
"I was confused by that,” she says. Her clients "were saying, ‘We don’t want to go to anybody but you, but our dog needs to be done — he’s getting stinky, his toenails are growing,’ and one had a serious skin infection. The dog is actually getting aggressive toward them at home.”
(A phone survey by North Penn Now of several area big-box pet stores confirmed that at least one continues to offer grooming services.)
While she also is aware that some other groomers have chosen to remain open, she has considered, and rejected, operating through the shutdown. "I went through all the emotional phases,” she says. "I felt so forgotten. But this is my business license, and I am not putting that in jeopardy. Of course I applied for a waiver, explaining all the precautions I did even prior to the mandated shutdown. Of course I got a generic reply, ‘You’re not essential.’”
Otto explains that she wore mask and gloves when the virus first appeared, and instituted curbside pickup and drop-off for nervous clients. And she and other groomers make the case their services can be medically essential to man's best friend.
"Brushing out and shaving down severely matted dogs is not only painful but dangerous to dogs,” she says. "You can easily injure a dog due to the matting being so tight against the skin. Overbrushing, trying to remove the matting, can cause severe brush-burn and bleeding. Unkempt nails throw the whole body out of alignment and cause serious pain. Long nails can also get caught on certain objects and rip the nail right out of the foot.”
It’s a case the industry has made to Harrisburg as well. Several legislative attempts to reopen grooming services have been made, and currently
state House and
Senate bills await action.
For now, Otto says she’ll keep her spirits up and struggle through. "I can’t even cry about this,” she says. "I just lucked out. I have such a strong community of people around me, but it also kills me. I am one of those people who never asks for help. It’s hard for me to accept help, but I’m getting backed into a corner.”
"If they did what they said they were going to do to help us, to keep everyone safe and do this mandate, I would have no problem with it,” she says. "But I feel like a lot of us small business owners are getting swept under the rug. Most small businesses, we don’t have that kind of savings and we don’t have that kind of money.”
"I do this for the love of a dog, and the love of what I do,” she says. "This is what I was put on the planet for.”
