Hi Neighbouring businesses,

The Government's decision to drop Auckland to alert level 1 was announced at 11.30 am on Friday.

Read how the timing of releasing the decision has affected an Auckland business in this story by Thomas Coughlan and John Anthony:

An Auckland restaurant owner says she will have to write off up to $15,000 in revenue for the week due to the Government’s decision to delay announcing when the city will move down alert levels.

A “preliminary decision” on whether to move from alert level 2 restrictions to level 1 was made Thursday evening, but the Government decided to wait until 11.30am on Friday to announce that from 12pm Auckland would move down to level 1.

Chand Sahrawat, co-owner of Auckland restaurants Cassia, Sidart and Sid at The French Cafe, said due to the delay in alert level change she would need to write off $10,000 to $15,000 in revenue for the week.

At alert level 2 her restaurants must operate one server per table, which slows down service, and have two metres between tables, resulting in the restaurants being able to operate at only 50 per cent capacity, she said.

"The whole process just slows down."

Without a warning on when alert levels would change the restaurants were not able to take forward bookings or order in the food they required because suppliers did not deliver ingredients on a weekend, she said.

Also, if they ordered ingredients but the move to level 1 did not go ahead when predicted then that could result in about $5000 of wasted ingredients, she said.

Chand said the Government seemed to move quickly into lockdown but took a long time to move down alert levels.

Read more here:

www.stuff.co.nz...

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