CHICAGO—The owners of Roscoe Village Bikes say the store really should be flourishing as Covid-19 restrictions fade absent, but profits this thirty day period are down about 10% from a calendar year back due to the fact the shop just can’t get more than enough new bikes and essential sections to fulfill demand.

“Our suppliers are telling us that they have containers entire of bikes sitting in the water” waiting around to make it via overloaded ports, mentioned Lesley Tweedie, co-proprietor of the store. Some bikes she orders nowadays may not arrive until eventually October, she stated. “It’s challenging to sell a bicycle with that substantially uncertainty.”

Like small companies across the place, most of the retailers on Roscoe Avenue, a community shopping district on Chicago’s North Aspect, are keen to get back again to ordinary just after a calendar year in which coronavirus restrictions held back foot targeted traffic and limited in-human being eating, browsing and services like haircuts. When organization is coming back again, small shops are now experiencing surprising issues, like shortages of personnel, resources and capital that are avoiding them from absolutely getting edge of the state’s reopening previously this month.

Five of the just about 50 companies on the strip, which include a songs university for preschoolers and a Latin fusion restaurant, closed forever, explained Colton Davis, company companies supervisor for the Lakeview Roscoe Village Chamber of Commerce. But 10 new companies have come in to switch them.

A Federal Reserve examine in April observed that tiny companies fared superior than envisioned nationally through the initial yr of the pandemic, mainly due to the fact of federal loan and stimulus courses. Whilst about 600,000 firms are unsuccessful yearly in a ordinary 12 months, the pandemic took out a further 200,000, much fewer than some predictions, the examine discovered.