While the chamber has not released information about the loan amounts companies received, President and CEO Dan Bates this week revealed a list of the top five companies for which gift cards were sold. Those were:
1. Fretboard Brewing & Public House
2. Richards Pizza
3. Tano Bistro Hamilton
4. Basil 1791
5. Municipal Brew Works
K.D. Manning, general manager at Fretboard, was pleased to learn his company was the leader in purchases for the chamber’s gift cards.
“We love it,” Manning said. “We try really hard to do a good job here, and we really try to make everyone happy, and we have really great made-from-scratch food, which is crazy for a brewery to have.
“We have three types of dining, with the three floors, and we have the only rooftop bar in Hamilton.”
Fretboard now is fully open, at a more limited capacity with tables more spaced out, and “we have partitions everywhere, so everyone’s safe, everyone’s apart,” Manning said Thursday. “We had a full rooftop from 4 o’clock to close last night.”
Not all selling chamber gift certificates
Some businesses, like Fretboard, are selling their own gift cards online, rather than the ones the chamber is selling to recoup loans to them. The chamber is not pressing such companies to offer the chamber’s gift cards, which would repay the companies’ loans and be used to make future loans to Hamilton’s small businesses.
Two of those that received loans went out of business: A Game Knight and Hamilton Diner, which opened immediately before the pandemic in Lindenwald at the location where Lindenwald Station had been before its move to Fairfield.
“We’re going to keep selling them, hopefully not for the rest of my life,” Bates said with a laugh. “We knew that selling $300,000 worth of gift certificates, in $25 and $50 increments, was going to take a while. So we’re in it for a long haul.”
There are two benefits to buying the chamber’s gift certificates, Bates said:
- “It’s a viable way for people to buy gifts for people, because it can all be done online,” he said. “So it’s very simple, it comes to their email, they can print it out and take it wherever they go.”
- But “the bigger picture here, the reason we’re really pushing to sell more gift certificates in the future, is not to get the money back, because when the city gave us the money, it was a one-way transaction (a gift that wasn’t to be returned to the city),” Bates said. “It was an investment in economic development.” Instead, money that returns to the chamber must be used for “a small-business loan fund for businesses in Hamilton that can take out a loan with zero interest without having to go through a financial institution.”
So the more money that pours back to the chamber through gift certificates, the more loans can be offered to Hamilton’s small businesses, “because you never know which one of your favorite businesses might need to tap into that,” Bates said.
One loan already has gone out to a business to the single company that sought one.
Bates said he has no problem with companies selling their own gift certificates as they continue to recover from the pandemic, rather than the chamber’s ones, although he noted, it’s “one of the challenges to why we’re not selling more gift certificates.”
Rather than pressing them to use the chamber’s certificates, “We’re allowing them to do business, because we think they’ve had enough restrictions over the past year. The deck is totally stacked against us, but that’s OK, because this is really all about the businesses.”
Grateful recipients
The gift certificate program has been popular with businesses. When Stephanie Koyoto, manager of the Almond Sisters’ bakery, sees them used, “Every time I see that, it just gives me, in my heart, a little flutter, like: ‘I’m so glad they did this. It’s sweet.’”
Angel Smith, who this time last year was fretting about how she would pay rent, utilities and other costs for A&A Pretty Pets, which she and A.J. Hoskins operate at 229 Main St., at the time said she had not yet heard about receiving a federal PPP loan. She eventually received about $1,000 from the federal program, but the approximately $2,000 from the chamber arrived more quickly. Best of all, she said, was the $1,500 grant from the city of Hamilton.
“Our equipment, it’s not cheap at all,” Smith said. “And having to run a high-velocity dryer, in my tiny shop, my utility bill’s $60-something a month, and it’s a tiny shop.”
The gift certificates are excellent, but redeeming them “does kind of take a toll, because we’re a service” and still a bit “wobbly on our books” in recovery mode.
On the other hand, “We are doing great,” she said Friday. “We’re booked out until the 22nd, 23rd.”
How to buy a gift certificate
Here’s the website address where you can get a gift certificate sold by the Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce to recoup pandemic loans to Hamilton businesses:
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