Small Business

Stop With the Covid Excuses, Already—Customers Have Caught On

If you’re considering blaming the pandemic for product shortages or slow service, think again. 

Illustration: Gwendal Le Bec for Bloomberg Businessweek
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Poor service? Closed during business hours? Failure to deliver? Covid excuses are everywhere these days: taped onto the doors of closed businesses, heard on call center messages, typed into company emails. And customers are over it.

A Covid excuse shirks responsibility while communicating the problem in the form of an excuse, akin to business owners “simply giving up and letting customers suffer,” says U.K. small-business coach Peter Boolkah. “It has never been OK to blame the pandemic for poor service.”