8M Longview News-Journal, Monday, April 13, 2020 news-journal.com

All times Central

Tempted by Danger Lifetime, 7 p.m. Original FilmMarried and pregnant Angela (Keshia Knight Pulliam) sets up her sister, rising attorney Nicole (Gabrielle Graham), with the dreamy executive (Michael Xavier) she’s just hired. Then his obsessive nature starts to surface.

Nature of LoveHallmark Channel, 8 p.m. Original Film

A fi sh-out-of-water writer, Katie (Emilie

Ullerup), scores an assignment going undercover as a guest at a luxury camping resort in the gorgeous Pacifi c Northwest. She faces her fears with the help of outdoorsman Will (Christopher Russell), who looks ruggedly handsome holding a glass of champagne by the lake. Cheers!

Paranormal 911Travel Channel, 8 p.m. Season PremiereThe series relating encounters emergency responders have had with the paranormal returns for a new season. In the premiere, apolice offi cer faces a terrifying entity while investigating a home invasion; a tortured apparition wreaks havoc on a top-secret government site; and paramedics are brutally attacked by an unseen force at an asylum.

The UnXplainedHistory, 9 p.m.In “Vampires and Werewolves,” well, this

bites. For tonight’s roundup of strange mysteries, host William Shatner presents a report on self-proclaimed vampires living (and drinking blood!) in New Orleans, as well as a look at the hairy medical condition known as “Werewolf Syndrome.”

Jungle Animal RescueNat Geo Wild, 9 p.m. New Series

A land of elephants, tigers, leopards, bears and other animals, India is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. But it’s also home to 1.3 billion human beings who increasingly compete with these creatures for living space. This series follows a dedicated team of conservationists and vets working to rescue animals in distress and fi nd a way for the country’s people and wildlife to coexist in harmony.

From the editors of TV Weekly and tvinsider.com

BEST BETSALWAYS KNOW WHAT TO WATCH

SATURDAY

Black Panther (2018, Action) Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jor-dan TBS, 7 p.m.

CasablancaTCM, 7 p.m.“The TCM Classic Film Festival — The Home Version” weekend continues today, headlined by this iconic Best Picture Oscar winner from 1942 starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains and a fantastic supporting cast backed by an Oscar-winning screenplay that is one of the most perfectly crafted in fi lm history. Everything fi res on all cylinders in Casablanca’s tale of lost love, sacrifi ce, redemption and reluctant patriotism, and it’s little wonder why it’s often considered among the greatest movies of all time.

MOVIES YOU’LL LOVE

CATCH A CLASSIC

‘Black Panther’

TCM

MARVEL STUDIOS

NAT GEO WILD

‘Jungle Animal Rescue’

crisis like this, the idea of bringing peo-ple together becomes an anathema.”

Even discounters and wholesale clubs like Walmart and Costco that re-main open so customers can still buy essential items like groceries and toilet paper have had to shift their offerings to focus on household goods while ig-noring the racks of trendy clothing elsewhere in their stores.

But many mall-based clothing retail-ers like Gap, Kohl’s and Macy’s that were already struggling before the pan-demic haven’t been able to pivot suc-cessfully to online-only. Although they have been expanding their presence, with clothing accounting for about 27% of overall online sales last year, their businesses aren’t built for their stores to remain shuttered for such a long stretch.

With spring merchandise piled up and nowhere to go, many chains are slashing prices anywhere from 40% to 70%. Some like Gap and Ralph Lauren have temporarily stopped ordering for the fall season with no clear view of

when stores will reopen. A slew of re-tailers announced late last month they would have to stop paying a majority of their employees in order to preserve cash, although they would continue to cover their health benefits.

Forrester Research retail analyst Sucharita Mulpuru says most mall-based retailers are not embracing ser-vices like curbside deliveries, which could help them hold onto at least some sales during the pandemic. She also says they should be creating content online to lure their loyal credit card customers, although she acknowledges they’re in survival mode.

But even those moves will only go so far to stem the bleeding and many retailers could end up shutting their doors for good. Coresight Research predicts that 15,000 U.S. stores will per-manently close this year, setting a new record and nearly doubling its earlier forecast of 8,000 store closings.

Global brands have been looking to China, which is slowly emerging from the pandemic, to see what the future may hold. Bricks-and-mortar retailers

there are gradually reopening but face a possible permanent loss of customers to fast-growing online rivals after mil-lions of families were confined to their homes for months in a country that al-ready is one of the biggest e-commerce markets.

E-commerce accounted for 21.5% of retail sales in January and February, up 5% from a year earlier. By contrast, e-commerce was about 10% of last year’s U.S. retail spending, according to the Commerce Department.

Overall, e-commerce sales in the U.S. soared 38% from March 12 to March 31 compared with its March 1 to March 11 baseline, the week before the World Health Organization announced that the COVID-19 was a pandemic, accord-ing to the most recent numbers by Ado-be Analytics.

For Lee Walzer, a 56-year-old lawyer from Arlington, Virginia, shopping has been a low priority, whether it’s online or in stores. He is only buying the es-sentials from his local grocery store and on Amazon as he hunkers down and works from home.

RetailersFrom Page 4M

businesses to help stem the spread of the virus and told residents to stay in-side their homes as much as possible.

Unlike other industries that have seen even e-com-merce sales disappear, beauty consumption has partly shifted online or to drug stores, which are still considered essential businesses. Since closing their stores nationwide, Ulta’s seen a “significant

uptick in e-commerce” this month, CEO Mary Dillon said during a Thursday conference call. The increased demand has been substantial enough that distribution centers are running in “holiday mode.”

“The beauty enthusiast has an emotional, deep connection with beauty despite the economic en-vironment,” Dillon said. “We don’t see that chang-ing.”

BeautyFrom Page 4M

likelihood, experts said, the numbers will keep going up at meat plants, farms, ware-houses and packaging facto-ries across the globe.

The infections speak to a growing threat to the world’s food supplies. Massive oper-ations where workers pick berries together, cut meat side-by-side on a produc-tion line or load warehouse trucks in sometimes close proximity risk slowing down. Some facilities may have to shutter for cleaning and worker quarantines. Pro-duce could end up rotting in fields if there aren’t enough healthy workers.

“If we can’t flatten the curve, then that is going to affect farmers and farm laborers — and then we have to make choices about which crops we harvest and which ones we don’t,” said Al Stehly, who operates a farm-management business in California’s North San Di-ego County. “We hope no one gets sick. But I would expect some of us are going to get the virus.”

The food from a plant where infection pops up

doesn’t pose health concerns because by all accounts COVID-19 isn’t a food-borne illness. Supplies from a farm or a production plant with a confirmed case can still be sent out for distribution.

Still, there is a risk to con-tinued production. When a worker gets sick, the employ-ee and every person they’ve come into contact with has to be quarantined. That could mean limited impact in some cases, like at the Sanderson factory, where the infect-

ed individual’s work was contained to one small pro-cessing table. But the more employee mingling there is, the bigger the threat to pro-duction. That’s what’s being seen now at Smithfield’s big plant. Other producers are watching it closely.

“One of our beef plants feeds 22 million people per day, so it’s vital that these plants stay open,” Dave Ma-cLennan, chief executive officer of Cargill Inc., the world’s largest agricultural

commodities trader, said in a recent Bloomberg Television interview.

At many meat-processing plants, workers are “essen-tially elbow to elbow,” said Thomas Hesse, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 401, the largest private sector union in Western Canada that represents 32,000 members, mostly in food processing and retailing. Though em-ployees are usually wearing protective gear, the risk of contagion is difficult to com-pletely eliminate.

“There’s underlying ten-sion, there’s fear and there’s anxiety,” Hesse said, calling on employers to act more dil-igently to keep workers safe, including by increasing the space between work stations.

Moves like that would like-ly hamper output though. It’s a tricky balance for produc-ers who are prioritizing work-er safety while trying to meet the huge surge in demand the virus has unleashed. Grocery store shelves across the world are running empty as consumers load their pan-tries in anticipation of long lockdown periods.

FoodFrom Page 4M

have been approved by the SBA. In 2019, it handled under 60,000.

Bankers say they knew going into the program that there would be a tsu-nami of applications. But even those expectations were blown out of the wa-ter — Huntington Bank, the largest SBA lender by volume, had 16,000 appli-cations the first weekend. The bank handled SBA 36,000 applications in 2019.

A smaller bank, Wash-ington Trust Bank, located in the Pacific Northwest, received 1,900 applications the first week, 20 times the number of applications it handled last year.

“It’s been absolute cha-os, and we haven’t even gotten to the point where the program is fully open yet,” said Jack Heath, pres-ident of Washington Trust. Heath said there were still another 600 applications waiting to be processed.

Some banks and loan brokers have been trying to rein in owners’ expecta-tions. When Robert Bentz applied to TD Bank on Monday, he was told he’d hear from the bank in three to five days. Bentz, owner of Purplegator, a digital marketing company based in King of Prussia, Penn-sylvania, subsequently got an email from a TD staffer saying his application was being reviewed.

But banks’ require-ments also frustrated owners. Many banks re-

quired applicants to have an existing relationship with the bank, for exam-ple, a business checking account, credit card and line of credit. Long-time customers with only one or two accounts found themselves needing to ap-ply elsewhere.

One week in, fewer than a quarter of the banks have actually funded the loans and sent money to businesses, said an exec-utive at a bank industry group, who declined to be identified in order to dis-cuss the details of the pro-gram.

The loans of up to $10 million at an interest rate of 1% offer forgiveness of money used to retain or re-hire laid-off workers.

While some banks were slow to get the necessary infrastructure up and running to accept applica-tions, the problems were further compounded by technological issues at the SBA, bankers said. It is taking more than an hour to submit each application to the SBA, the industry group executive said.

Legalities have also held up the approval and fund-ing process. The banks said they had to wait for the SBA to give them guid-ance on how to process the loans and distribute the funds. Bankers still cau-tious a decade after the Great Recession were re-luctant to make loans that the government might not guarantee.

FundsFrom Page 4M

AP Photo

Employees and family members protest outside a Smithfield Foods processing plant in Thursday in Sioux Falls, S.D. The plant has had an outbreak of coronavirus cases according to Gov. Kristi Noem.