With the Vaccine mandate which came into effect September 13th, 2021, local businesses are taking a huge hit in profits and in-person traffic. The majority of businesses that are being effected are restaurants, gyms, airlines, bars and tourist attractions as they require full proof of vaccination prior to entry. What makes this situation worse is that most of these businesses are still trying to recoup losses from the initial lock down in 2020.
As of December 11, 2021, 76% of people within Canada are fully vaccinated and are capable of maintaining a vaccine passport when visiting businesses and other local services. That means a quarter of our entire country can't access most business services and on the other hand, that means that businesses have lost at least a quarter of their customers as well as their staff. When companies are on the fence of being profitable, which 50-60% of small business are, losses to a customer base will have a massive impact on the bottom line for these businesses. Small businesses around the world being forced to implement proof of vaccination can not afford this for the coming weeks, months and potentially, years ahead. Because businesses now have to check for their customer's vaccines, their staffing costs are being pushed unnecessarily high.
The vaccine mandate is not only having an external impact on business but internally as well. While businesses have to check employees vaccines cards, it has become significantly difficult to attract and retain workers. While some business owners agree that the vaccine mandate will protect their staff from customers and vice versa, customers will also demand employees to show their vaccination as well. Businesses around the country that are mandating vaccinations are already losing employees
every day. Forbes released an article that states that 33% of hospital workers in the United States, including nurses and physicians, are refusing to get vaccinated. But are we really surprised that people are leaving their jobs when forced to get an under studied vaccine against their will?
So who's actually enforcing the vaccine passports? In some areas, police forces are requesting raises if they now have to go business-to-business to enforce vaccine passports. As if the police force doesn't have anything better to do! A majority of small businesses are not able to afford the cost of monitoring the vaccine passport as they don't have the resources to do it themselves or to hire new staff to do so. On top of that, whenever a customer is denied access for not having a vaccine, the business will incur a lot of customer service complaints, issues and negative situations with customers. It may not seem like a massive loss but in reality it opens up a whole can of worms that wasn't necessary. At the end of the day, the situation could go any which way and it is an injustice that we have to face them ourselves.