Aaron Rodgers isn't just hosting 'Jeopardy!' — he's saving a lot of small businesses - The Athletic
The country’s deadliest wildfire in a century left the small Northern California town of Paradise with almost nothing.
According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Camp Fire ravaged 153,336 acres in Butte County over 17 days in November 2018 while demolishing 18,804 buildings and killing 85 people.
“Literally our entire town was decimated,” said April Kelly, manager of Nic’s Restaurant in Paradise. “There was really nowhere to go.”
Nic’s opened not long after the fire was contained to give Paradise residents a place to gather in a town destroyed, if they even wanted to come back. All the employees hired were survivors of the fire who lost their homes. While working at the restaurant, they lived in mobile homes and trailers. The kitchen manager didn’t have hot water at home for his first six months on the job. Kelly washed her employees’ uniforms at her house.
Despite the daunting task of creating a community gathering spot in a town where nearly everything had burned, Nic’s thrived, even through the pain it brought people to come back and see Paradise in ruins.
The foundation of Nic’s was built on human interaction as a method of healing. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, that too faded.
“We lost the heart of what the restaurant was even about,” Kelly said. “In the news, they’re saying everyone’s dealing with this pandemic and this tragedy, but for us, we had already been through a major tragedy. So it’s like, here we are in a second tragedy, which was really hard on everybody.”
Nic’s became a glorified drive-thru, Kelly said, which dealt a gut punch to her staff’s morale. The restaurant closed for two months not only to save jobs but also to give everyone a mental break after everything they’d endured in the past two years. Even when Nic’s re-opened, business was grim enough that Kelly feared the worst coming.
“We were at a point where we were pretty sure that we were gonna close in the next few months,” she said.
This time, for good.
The reason Nic’s is still open and will remain open past the pandemic is largely because of Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.
Rodgers, a Butte County native from the city of Chico, recently partnered with the North Valley Community Foundation (NVCF) to create the Aaron Rodgers Small-Business COVID-19 Fund to help save small businesses that have suffered during the pandemic in and around his hometown. Rodgers donated $1 million of his own and has helped raise hundreds of thousands more by attaching his name to the cause. The NVCF has provided grants in different amounts to 80 small businesses in Northern California, Nic’s included, to help cover rent, payroll, utilities and other expenses.
Nicki Jones is the owner of Nic’s, and her sister recently died. Kelly applied for the grant without her knowing. Rodgers and NVCF president Alexa Benson-Valavanis surprised the two women with a FaceTime call to tell them, essentially, that a business meaning so much to a town so devastated would be saved.
“To be able to tell her this news and then have Aaron call her — she literally was making funeral plans for her sister that day,” Kelly said. “To give her that news when we all had been through so much. After we got off, Nicki just burst into tears.”
“For us, it has been, obviously, the difference between our decision to close and not,” Kelly said. “To really have one person make such a huge difference where his roots are, that takes a pretty extraordinary person.”
In addition to Nic’s, The Athletic spoke with 11 other small businesses in Chico about their stories and how the NFL MVP’s efforts will help keep them afloat through and after the pandemic.
A&J Party Center owner Ben Murray fought back tears as he described what Rodgers’ help means to his business.
Murray, a third-generation owner and lifelong Packers fan whose grandfather started the party rental and sales store in 1978, began working for his grandfather at age 12 servicing equipment. Thirty years later, he oversees a business that handles weddings, graduations, festivals, charity events, company parties and birthdays by helping to plan the events and providing supplies like balloons and decorations to make them happen.
When the pandemic hit and group gatherings were no longer permitted, Murray’s business cratered.
“I was scared to answer the phone,” he said. “It wasn’t business coming in ever. It was always cancellations.”
Murray laid off staff because a family business that’s normally busy seven days a week was almost dormant. He said there was no payroll because he wasn’t even paying himself to run the shop. He was “very” behind on rent, too.
Entering what he hopes will be a much busier summer than last year’s, Murray’s biggest concerns have been alleviated thanks to Rodgers’ help.
“Somebody that I’ve rooted for his entire career to come through for my business, I mean, that — sorry, I’m getting choked up a bit — meant a lot,” Murray said. “I can never thank him enough. I’ll tell you that much. … Nobody here at our store will ever forget what he’s done for us. I think more people need to realize that our sports heroes aren’t just people who do things on the field.”
Sin of Cortez owner Danielle Marie Ius has been working 60 to 70 hours per week to keep labor down so her breakfast restaurant in Chico can stay open.
She took one day off last February, one last July, one last August and one on Thanksgiving. That’s it.
“The help from Aaron, I’ve actually taken a day off the last three weeks in a row, one day off a week!” she said. “His contribution has definitely helped that, my mental health, greatly.”
Sin of Cortez opened in 1999 and prides itself on a wide variety of pancakes, coffee, fresh ingredients and fancy food presentations. About half of Ius’ two dozen employees left because of the pandemic, she said, and she had to order outdoor heaters, craft a patio and serve breakfast for dinner outdoors to generate any sort of income.
Rodgers’ assistance has allowed Ius to pay the restaurant’s mortgage, add more jobs, train workers and ultimately provide hope for a woman drained from her efforts to keep the business she has owned for 19 years afloat.
“The business suffered, but because of Aaron Rodgers, it’s gonna be OK. And I’m just so grateful for him,” Ius said. “I’ve cried a lot the last year to people I don’t even know. Rodgers brightened all of our days a little bit.”
Sweet Chico Confections shut down for almost two months last year because downtown Chico became deserted.
Since 2007, Hal and Nancy Carlson have run the candy store that offers more than 5,000 different kinds of candies, chocolates, gelatos, sodas, board games and other treats.
“We say our demographics are (ages) 2 to 99,” Nancy Carlson said. “We have little 2-year-olds that love to come in and find their sweet treat as well as grandmas and grandpas that are finding their nostalgia here.”
The Carlsons employ high school and college students on a part-time basis, but they had to take unemployment last year, and upon reopening, the store offered only curbside pickup.
One of the main reasons they stayed afloat last spring was the high demand for custom-filled Easter baskets that Nancy and her daughter, who had also been laid off, spent “24/7” assembling for customers. They normally stay open until 9 p.m. selling ice cream and desserts, too, but they had to close earlier because of less demand.
Rodgers’ efforts have not only helped with rent and payroll but also allowed the Carlsons to stay open later and free up money to bring new products to the store. And they’ll still sell their green and gold M&M’s, just like they do every Sunday when the hometown kid plays quarterback for the Packers.
“I wish there was some way I could personally thank him,” Nancy Carlson said. “It’s just hard to put into words, truly. It kind of gets me teary-eyed … I’m proud to say he’s from Chico and that he represents our town because he’s a pretty classy guy.”
Bidwell Perk co-owners Michelle and Gentry Power received a $10,000 check from Rodgers and the NVCF to cover rent for more than four months.
“It’s the first time in, shoot, 13 months that we don’t have anxiety about whether or not we can pay rent,” Gentry Power said. “It’s turning a corner of hope and light for the future. It makes us feel like we’re going to be OK and we’re going to be able to stay open and in service to the community that we love so much.”
The couple has run the Chico coffee and breakfast spot for the past 15 years. They served first responders during the Camp Fire and, in Gentry Power’s words, are “the epitome of a very small business in a very small town.” Even when indoor dining was prohibited, regulars would sit on the patio in freezing temperatures with their Bidwell Blend coffee or iced tea, Michelle Power said.
Bidwell Perk has no drive-thru operation or sophisticated delivery system, so they struggled mightily during the height of the pandemic, in part because they never closed and insisted on keeping all of their employees.
Both of the Powers’ sons still have signed footballs from Rodgers, whom Michelle Power remembers ordering a blended white mocha from them when visiting Chico shortly after the Packers won the Super Bowl in 2011.
My Oven’s Meals started as a meal prep service out of Mary Chin’s kitchen four years ago. She was her only employee.
Chin, a classically trained chef, originally intended for it to be a part-time job while her husband worked nine-hour shifts at a hospital. But it has turned into a full-time gig, and Chin has a commercial kitchen, delivery van and staff working for her. She posts her menu online once a week, prepares all the meals Sunday and delivers them Monday. She uses locally sourced, farm-raised ingredients and specializes in gluten-free meals.
When the pandemic first hit, Chin halted business because her father had stage 4 lung cancer and she didn’t want to interact with people while also visiting him.
In a time when the food delivery space is far more competitive than before and after taking time off from her business, Rodgers’ help has allowed Chin to be rent-free through the end of 2021, give raises to her employees and decrease her own workload as she carves out her niche in a saturated market.
Said Chin: “It’s just a great weight off my shoulders.”
Great Harvest Bread Co.‘s Jamie Hughes received a phone call around midnight in November that the large oven at one of their locations broke down while filled with bread.
“The first thought is, ‘How do we save all the product?’ because we couldn’t afford to lose all that,” said Hughes, who has co-owned the bakery and cafe’s three Chico locations since 2014 with her sister, Julie Kampfen. “And then the second thought was, ‘We can’t afford a new oven right now and if we don’t have an oven, we don’t have a business.'”
Through tears, Hughes helped transport all the bread to a smaller oven in the middle of the night and contemplated closing the bakeries because of how hard it would be to stay in business without their large oven. Luckily, it was fixed free of charge and, with the money granted by Rodgers and the NVCF, they won’t have to worry about how they’ll pay for any similar equipment fixes in the future.
Said Hughes: “It just felt so personal, at the same time, that somebody who also grew up here where we are didn’t forget about everybody here and that it means so much to him to make sure that our community is gonna get through all of this together.”
They make their own bread, sandwiches, salads and other lunch items, in addition to offering breakfast treats and coffee in the morning. Because of the pandemic, office crowds no longer congregated for their lunch break at Great Harvest, parents and their children no longer visited after school for a snack and catering sales to schools and offices diminished.
The sisters decided to shorten hours Monday through Friday and close altogether on Saturdays because they weren’t making enough money to stay open on the weekend, but didn’t cut employee hours because they employ college students and “it would be hard to face them if we took everything away from them,” Hughes said.
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Pueblito opened its second location in Chico early last year, only for the pandemic to hit a month later.
Instead of his Mexican restaurant expanding past its first location in nearby Durham, Jesus Plascencia was forced to offer takeout only and decrease employee hours. He said he and his employees got bored some days because they didn’t have any customers.
After a continuous decline in business from March through December, Plascencia’s wife showed him the finances for their two locations at the end of 2020 and told him he had to make a decision to close for good or stay in business and keep taking financial blows.
“When she put it into that perspective, I was like, ‘Oh, man,'” said Plascencia, who opened his first location in 2016. “It really hit me. I think I didn’t wanna accept reality.”
Just as he was about to permanently shut down, he got a call from Rodgers. Now, Pueblito is in far better shape with rent, payroll and utilities and can increase employee hours again.
“That just kind of brought us back to our feet,” Plascencia said. “We were at that point where we were about to give up, and that was like a hand to get up and keep going … I’m not a really big football fan. But now, if there’s a team I’m gonna go for, it’s Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, of course.”
The Bookstore owner Josh Mills called downtown Chico “a post-apocalyptic movie” when the pandemic first struck, and he was forced to reduce sales to curbside service through the door since a business that relies on in-person visitors couldn’t have any of them.
Mills loves The Bookstore, which opened in 1976 and where he’s worked since 1990, because it connects old-school Chico to the present day through literature, whether via history, art, cooking, gardening or a wide variety of other topics. He has seen people who came in as kids now bring their own kids to the store.
“It’s kind of got that magic of tradition,” Mills said.
With Rodgers’ help, Mills doesn’t have to worry about rent, utilities and payroll for three months, a grant that came at a time when The Bookstore was severely struggling financially.
Kona’s owner Chris Yarbrough had planned to sell his shop by now.
In 2019, Yarbrough’s wife, son and dog moved to Arizona because she took a job in a larger market that she couldn’t pass up. He intended to stay in Chico until he found the next owner of Kona’s before joining his family in Arizona.
“The pandemic hit, and that took the whole plan and situation to a point where a sale is a non-option and striving to stay alive was the only alternative,” Yarbrough said. “It was an underlying mental game every day of not being with my family.”
Kona’s, which opened in 1993 as a sandwich shop in Chico that now sells bread to more than 30 local businesses, has been owned by Yarbrough since 2007. The pandemic forced Yarbrough’s staff to a third of what it was, and he shortened business hours while offering only curbside pickup.
It normally serves as a spot for local high school and college students to hang out while music plays, and it’s a locale Rodgers would visit on Fridays in high school while wearing his Pleasant Valley High School football jersey.
Yarbrough is still in Chico, but Rodgers’ financial help has given him hope after what has been a trying year. Not only can he catch up on bills and hire more people because of the grant, but also business has picked up because people are frequenting Kona’s more often with Rodgers’ name now attached to the shop in local media coverage.
“It’s like a human medicine that’s being passed around with the story,” Yarbrough said. “People coming in that don’t wanna buy anything and just want to talk because they’re so happy the place has Aaron’s help. … For him to come in and do that, it was just unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
Sicilian Cafe owner James Taylor estimates he lost $50,000 to $60,000 in business during November 2018 because the Camp Fire forced private parties that had been booked to cancel.
“That really knocked us down,” Taylor said. “We’ve been struggling ever since to get back on our feet.”
The restaurant, which advertises its fresh vegetables, seafood and more than 150 wines, opened in 1984, and Taylor took over running it from his mother a decade later.
He finally stabilized business about a year after the Camp Fire, then the pandemic hit, and a spot that has spanned five generations of family members needed financial help again. Taylor, whose wife and daughter work with him at the restaurant, had to temporarily shut down and make curbside pickup work when they reopened.
With patrons returning to dine both indoors and outdoors, the restaurant is booked on weekends for the near future, Taylor said. He also has a new landlord, whom Taylor is thrilled to pay on time, finally without stress of missing a deadline, thanks to Rodgers.
“It’s like a prayer being answered,” said Taylor, a Pleasant Valley High School graduate like Rodgers. “It took a big burden off our hearts and off our minds to have this relief and being able to go to sleep and not have to worry about these things. It was just a godsend.”
The Naked Lounge is a coffee shop that opened in 2001 in downtown Chico as a hotspot for local college students, dubbed by current co-owner Michael Lee as a “really eclectic Bohemian cafe that everybody loves, especially in the early 2000s when that was the thing.”
Lee was part of a four-person group that purchased the spot in summer 2020 in fear it would soon become a retail shop or bar after it was put up for sale because of the pandemic. The native Chicoan, who has frequented The Naked Lounge since it opened, wanted to preserve it by upgrading the live music stage, installing a full kitchen, importing better coffee and providing a full food menu to customers.
The grant from Rodgers and the NVCF has, among other financial benefits, allowed Lee and company to better pay their employees while still focusing on the renovations that will help keep The Naked Lounge one of Chico’s unique hangout spots.
“I couldn’t be more grateful and humbled by it,” Lee said. “He loves his people. He loves his hometown, and this is obviously a reflection of that.”
The game show “Jeopardy!” is matching all contestant winnings from Rodgers’ two weeks as guest host and donating it to his small-business fund. The first week of Rodgers hosting generated $117,725. The fund, which was Rodgers’ idea after he was inspired by the Barstool Fund’s similar mission to raise money for struggling small businesses, has far surpassed the $1 million he pledged through hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by the public, “Jeopardy!” and the NVCF.
“I was joking around and said Aaron is single-handedly saving downtown Chico,” said Kelly, the manager of the Paradise restaurant revived by Rodgers. “But in a way, that’s kind of what he’s doing.”
Rodgers was closely involved with picking all 80 small businesses that have received grants. Businesses applied for the grants and in order to qualify, had to be locally owned and operated with fewer than 10 full-time employees. Within days of those 80 being identified, checks were mailed to the businesses for immediate aid.
The first round of grants was intended for restaurants and retail businesses. As more money flows into the fund through donations, another round of grants for additional small businesses is likely to follow in the MVP’s name.
“It’s exceeded all of my hopes and dreams,” said Benson-Valavanis, NVCF’s president. “That’s what happens when you play with Aaron Rodgers.”
(Photo: Ben Liebenberg / Associated Press)
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Aaron Rodgers isn't just hosting 'Jeopardy!' — he's saving a lot of small businesses - The Athletic
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