Across San Francisco, shop doors are swinging open and merchants are breathing a sigh of relief.

Ninety-five percent of the city’s businesses were allowed to reopen Monday, according to Mayor London Breed, to provide curbside pickup for their wares. And they're not alone.

The city of Berkeley, as well as Santa Clara, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda counties all made the same move this week, transitioning into what Gov. Gavin Newsom has dubbed Stage 2 of his California Resilience Roadmap, a guide to why, and when, shelter-in-place orders will ease.

Still, thousands of merchants, the entrepreneurs whose dreams weave together into the unique fabric that is San Francisco, remain closed.

Their futures remain as cloudy as the city’s fitful fog.

Those remaining 5% of San Francisco businesses — from Breed’s estimate — include gyms, barbershops, nail salons, tattoo parlors and any service that requires physical presence in a room.

The known science behind the pandemic suggests they are “high-risk” businesses for COVID-19 transmission, in California parlance, and will only be given the green light to reopen when the state transitions to Stage 3.

But when will that day come? And will those so-called high-risk businesses survive until then?

Roughly 3,397 retail stores reopened Monday, according to city officials. But they did not provide specific counts of other types of merchants that remain closed, like gyms or barbershops

And while it is difficult to figure out the exact number of still-closed merchants in San Francisco, the city has 257,000 registered businesses that pay local taxes annually, according to public data.

That data includes many types of businesses without storefronts, an important caveat, but 5% of that number is roughly 13,000 — suggesting thousands of stores may still be closed.

Merchants who are still closed, speaking to KQED, fear repercussions across their respective industries.

Maryo Mogannam, president of the San Francisco Council of District Merchants Associations, worries financial assistance available to small businesses is too limited. Several merchant groups have publicly reported numerous merchants are still awaiting approval for federal loans. And what city could possibly provide enough money to save tens of thousands of ailing merchants, alone?

“Losing these last businesses, even as others open, would be devastating to us,” Mongannam said. “I mean, can you imagine all the barbers, you know, just suddenly shut down?”

Not everyone has to imagine.

‘Devastating’ closure

Jonah Buffa and his brother Sam own and operate Fellow Barber, a chain of six barbershops in New York City and two in San Francisco, one of which is downtown, while the other is on Valencia and 18th streets — in the heart of the Mission District.

In normal times, San Franciscans in Fellow Barber on Valencia are treated to a chorus of snips while they watch customers flow in and out of Taqueria El Buen Sabor across the street, emerging with shiny aluminum treasures.

These are far from normal times.

When the shelter-in-place order arrived in March, Jonah Buffa laid off 45 of his employees in San Francisco. The staff is small, and he knew many of them and their families well.

“It was surreal and devastating and really sad to build something up over ten years and then to literally dismantle it yourself. To basically pull the lever that brings the entire train to a screeching halt," he said.

That’s a feeling David Groeschel knows all too well. A San Francisco native and graduate of George Washington High School, Groeschel owns Mom’s Body Shop, a tattoo parlor that has inked the skin of San Franciscans in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for 22 years.

Groeschel’s nine-or-so independent contractors are all without work now. His five paid staff aren’t working either. He remembers the last tattoo his shop inked before the shutdown: an artwork mashup of a cartoon rabbit and Jason, the hockey mask-wearing antagonist of the movie "Friday the 13th," by tattoo artist Paul Block.

That tattoo was inked on Friday, March 13, four days before the shutdown — perhaps an omen.

While San Francisco life nowadays may not resemble a horror movie, it certainly resembles a post-apocalyptic one, boarded-up windows and all. And though Groeschel believes his business will survive, getting to the proverbial other side will hurt far worse than a tattoo needle by the time it’s over.

“None of us can pay our rent, so we're deferring,” he said. “If this doesn't end soon, we're gonna be tens of thousands of dollars in debt, each one of us trying to pay back our landlords.”

While San Francisco’s tax-paying business database does not allow search by business type, the combined total of businesses whose names include the words “salon, hair, barber” or “cuts” in San Francisco number 1,926 — from Ken’s Hair Design in Chinatown to Pink Pearl Beauty Salon in the Richmond District. The database shows 135 San Francisco shops with the word “tattoo” in its name, like Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City in North Beach.

They’re all waiting on the city, and the state, to hear when they can join in reopening, too.

Give it a month, maybe

In a publicly televised press conference one week into May, Newsom said California may be about a month away from moving into Stage 3 of the California Resilience Roadmap, when high-risk businesses can reopen.

Bay Area counties have set stricter guidelines to reopening, which KQED has reported previously, which include a decrease in newly identified COVID-19 cases; the ability to test 200 people per day per 100,000 residents; and no more than half of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients, among other requirements.

As KQED reported this week, San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Grant Colfax estimates Bay Area counties are still two to four weeks away from its next phase of openings.

While this may be tantalizing news for some, Jay Cheng, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, cautioned against haste. Beyond the health risks of opening too quickly, there’s a business risk, too.

“We've seen in other states like Georgia, where the economy's just been thrown wide open. And the problem is consumer confidence isn't there,” Cheng explained.

And that’s not just a lack of confidence in the economy, but in public health.

“The public was not sure if it was safe to go shopping in the way that the state said it was safe to go shopping. And so they didn't go shopping,” Cheng said.

Those businesses staffed up and spent major cash on reopening, but that cash didn’t see returns. In late April, local news outlets in Georgia featured headlines like, “Some Georgia businesses announced they would open, then almost immediately regretted it.”

Cheng said that even when businesses reopen, barbershops like Buffa’s may not be able to help as many clients in as many barber chairs as before to allow for social distancing. Tattoo parlors like Groeschel’s may need to bolster their sanitization methods, too.

This “last 5%” of businesses that have yet to reopen, Cheng said, “are going to go through a really difficult time for a very long time. And I think that's just a reality that we're facing at this point. They're going to need significant help to get restarted and they have to rethink a lot of their business model.”

Groeschel’s plans are already being drawn along those lines.

“Our thinking in the tattoo industry is like we know how to do this. We're like up there with hospitals (with) sterilization,” he said. “Tell the mayor and the health department, like, you know, get on the ball here and let's get us open safely.”

Some businesses feel they won’t survive the timelines laid out by city and state leaders.

Outta Frisco

Before every merchant in San Francisco flung their “CLOSED” signs up for the COVID-19 pandemic, Danielle Rabkin’s Crossfit Golden Gate suffered heavy financial losses from a far more hyperlocal merchant crisis: the construction of the Van Ness Improvement Project, which dug up the corridor for sewer improvements and future bus platforms.

The torn-up sidewalks convinced potential customers her gym was closed, and dust kicked up by nearby giant yellow construction machines blanketed the barbells from one end of her gym to the other. After her customers ebbed, she moved her gym some blocks away, and began the heavy lift of financial recovery.

“March was starting to look really good for me,” she said. Then the pandemic hit.

For Rabkin, it was among the worst years in the eight-year run of her gym. “I have a trickle of income left. My business has been completely wiped out. It's been totally devastating,” she said.

The city did not recompense her after the Van Ness construction project, though local officials later changed city rules to bake in merchant compensation into future projects, citing frustrated entrepreneurs like Rabkin. She garnered just as little government aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said. At this point, she just wants to work again.

“Our hospitals are empty and our curve is flat. There should be easing of restrictions. And I'm not talking about flipping a switch, but the gradual opening should be happening faster,” she said, “or there's going to be permanent closure of business.”

San Francisco’s tax database shows about 470 businesses with the words “crossfit," "gym” or “fitness” in its business name. Cheng, from the Chamber of Commerce, said Rabkin’s story illustrates a sad reality of the COVID-19 pandemic: Some small businesses will simply close, and there’s little that can be done about it.

The city must prepare for what comes next.

Cheng said the city, and merchants groups like his own, need to invest in those business owners, even if their local barbershops, tattoo parlors or gyms go under.

“The gym owner on Van Ness, she knows how to run a successful business. She knows what a successful gym looks like. We can't lose that talent,” Cheng said. “And so we can, after this pandemic passes, re-inspire her to give it another go in San Francisco. You know, she'll create those jobs again.”

Like the front-line workers, artists and city leaders, entrepreneurs will be among those who will rebuild San Francisco, Cheng said. People across the Bay Area, far and wide, know small businesses are the building blocks of thriving neighborhoods like North Beach or Chinatown, the Ingleside or Haight-Ashbury.

Rabkin is a fighter. She just may start anew. But, she said, shutting down her gym — her dream — is almost inconceivable.

“I've spent eight years building this business,” she said, “to even think about having to consider an exit strategy for something that is of no fault of my own is devastating.”

And if businesses like hers close, it may be devastating to San Francisco, too.