Cheryl Straughter and her son, Keith Motley, founded Soleil restaurant three years ago on the promise of serving fresh, healthy food made from scratch to the Roxbury community at affordable prices. They’ve stuck to that promise for three years.
Then the pandemic hit. And now they’re watching as the prices of their ingredients climb higher and higher.
Straughter buys her ingredients in smaller amounts because she doesn’t have access to large-scale vendors as a sole proprietor. She said she used to be able to buy beef for $4.29 per pound. Then it went up to $5. Then $6. Now she pays $7.29.
"I’m trying to hold fast to maintain a price point, but it becomes difficult to do so and run a profitable margin,” Straughter said. “For a business like mine, how are you going to survive this winter?”
Small businesses across the country are struggling as they face myriad challenges posed by the supply chain crisis, increased consumer demand and labor shortages — all without the large-scale vendors and other support structures that major corporations can rely upon.
According to a US Census poll of small businesses taken in late November, 66.5% of businesses said they were experiencing delays from domestic or foreign suppliers. In early April, that number was only 41.3%. This translates to an overwhelming majority — 74.8% — of small businesses reporting a large or moderate increase in the prices they pay for goods and services since the pandemic began in March 2020.
This is no “typical” pandemic-related supply chain crunch, and Nubian Square’s local businesses are no exception to the grim rule.
At Soleil, Straughter faces an impossible choice: raise her prices and risk losing customers or concede defeat and run at a loss.
In the same building, Dudley Café general manager Jebin Tuladhar said their supply shortages have created price hikes the likes of which he has never seen in his tenure as manager.
“The price of a product goes up every day,” he said. “We can’t just keep increasing the price of the menu because that’s typically not how the business is run.”
Rising paper prices have hit the café particularly hard. Because food needs to be packaged individually for safety reasons during the pandemic, the restaurant’s expenses for paper and plastic are beginning to outpace what they pay to make their food.
Tuladhar said that the restaurant is an anchor for Nubian Square and a celebration of local culture. The coffee shop boasts a rich multicultural menu that honors women of color with dishes named after Frida Kahlo, Michelle Obama and Boston’s own Ayanna Pressley.
“We have a lot of artists that come into the café, we have a lot of City Hall people come around,” Tuladhar said. “We also do art exhibitions for neighborhood artists … and we put their art often in the café.”
He believes his customers represent a slice of Roxbury’s community and culture. That community, he claims, has been changing for the better.
Tuladhar and Straughter are stuck playing the same game of chicken against the market. And the price of losing could have a domino effect in Nubian Square.
Every time a small business is forced to close their doors — especially one of the small, Black-owned businesses for which Nubian Square is famous — the neighborhood loses a piece of its rich cultural identity. That identity is what’s at stake, and it doesn’t come just from restaurants.
Clarissa Egerton is a co-owner of Frugal Bookstore, a local destination for Roxbury and Dorchester bookworms to get their hands on the latest reads. She and her husband, Leonard Egerton, have run the store for more than a decade. But the same paper crunch that Dudley Café is suffering from is hitting Frugal Bookstore even harder.
The couple had been hearing about potential supply chain delays since late last summer, and they did the best they could to shore up their supply. Unfortunately, all the preparation in the world couldn’t change their predicament when the causes are so far beyond their control.
“It doesn’t matter … how far in advance you order it, it’s still something that, you know, if the containers are holding all of this product and nobody’s getting it, we’re still not going to get it,” Clarissa Egerton said.
People say, 'we hope you make it, we wish you well ... but that is never a formula of success for me.Cheryl Straughter, Soleil restaurant owner
Frugal Bookstore has become a staple of Nubian Square over the years, a place for members of the community to gather, learn and share the books they love. It’s also a Black-owned family business, something that Clarissa Egerton thinks the area needs more of to revitalize the local economy after the first waves of the pandemic drove local businesses out of the community.
“I grew up in this community in the ’80s, and it was a thriving spot for retail,” she said. “We haven’t seen that in quite some time.”
If supply chain woes continue to worsen, it may be even harder for the neighborhood to return to a buzzing retail center.
Straughter might be fighting for her business’s survival, but she isn’t giving up just yet. She said she’s been working on augmenting Soleil’s business model with one of the most successful parts of her business post-pandemic: catering. She wants more exposure and to build more relationships with corporations, universities, and nonprofits to try to grow her revenue.
If one word describes small-business owners like Straughter in Nubian Square, it’s tenacious.
“People say, ‘we hope you make it, we wish you well’,” Straughter said, “but that is never a formula of success for me.”
Jacob Bentzinger is the CityWatch reporter for The Scope: Boston and a Northeastern University student majoring in journalism and computer science.
