One business closing permanently, one business closing indefinitely in Cadillac.
Within one week, Hermann’s Café announced they would be closing for the season, Raven Social said they would be suspending their lunch hours and adding to their dinner hours and Long Road Distillery is closing their Cadillac location permanently.
“There’s a lot of challenges in the world,” said Long Road Distillery owner and co-founder Kyle Van Strien. “Especially in the hospitality industry, still coming out of the pandemic.”
Long Road Distillery’s Cadillac location was only open for 22 months – and Van Strien says they loved the location
“It’s a great place where we spend some time with our families and enjoy the outdoor recreation in particular,” he said. “It’s a place that it’s kind of on the way to everything up north.”
But all good things must come to an end.
“It was a combination of factors that we came to this decision,” Van Strien said. “Part of it being a little farther away than our other locations. Part of it challenge finding staff who shared the same vision with us. I think that our concept was a little different than what most people have experience in, so I think that might have been part of the challenge.”
Cadillac Area Chamber of Commerce President Caitlyn Berard said businesses, especially local businesses, have dealt with a lot these past two years.
“Our businesses have been so strong these last two years and how proud we are as a community to withhold, withstand while the rest of the state was promoting that they were going to be losing 30% of their businesses over COVID, we didn’t,” she said.
Berard said issues like childcare, housing, rising food costs have been snowballing for businesses since the pandemic.
Now it’s catching up to them.
“There’s a lot of variables that have been rolling in and are going to continue to roll completely outside of our region,” she said. “Those are incredibly difficult. Residents and workforce are going through a lot more variables than they had been in the past. And we’ve got a lot more people overcoming them and experiencing them.”
But to Berard, it’s not all doom and gloom.
“It’s an opportunity for us to look, though, and say this is this is the importance of supporting your small businesses. It’s the importance of being very polite, respectful and appreciative of our service teams,” she said.
And for Long Road Distillery – it’s an opportunity that just didn’t work out.
“We need to focus on some of our other projects at this time,” said Van Strien.
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