As Labor Day nears, Myrtle Beach hopes to balance COVID safety with need for tourism
If it weren’t for face masks and social distancing, this Labor Day weekend in Myrtle Beach might not feel too different from any other. Locals still plan to avoid the high-trafficked areas, most know to not even set foot in a grocery store, and touristy restaurants are almost always off the table.
The same can’t be said for businesses throughout the Grand Strand, which spent the last three months trying to balance the need for money that tourists bring in with the need to protect their employees, those same tourists and local residents from the dangers of the new coronavirus, which has infected more than 9,400 Horry County residents and killed nearly 200 since March.
For some businesses, which felt the damage of the Myrtle Beach area’s bad press after being dubbed a regional epicenter of the pandemic in June, the thought of a new surge of COVID-19 seems terrifying.
“A lot of the people out there say on social media that they ride down the road and they don’t see people wearing masks. That’s because they’re outside. You know, we find that when they come in this door that they have masks on them,” said Michelle Plyler, whose husband owns the Gay Dolphin seaside tourist shop. “It’s been a struggle since (the area) became labeled as a hot spot, even though there were other areas of the country that were much more dramatically infected as far as the infection rate — we got a very bad reputation.”
Plyler isn’t too worried for the financial stability of her own business. A mainstay of Ocean Boulevard, the Gay Dolphin will come out fine in the end, she says. But her greater fear is for the livelihoods of much smaller local businesses, the shops and restaurants that give the Grand Strand character beyond giant attractions like the SkyWheel or the endless “$5.99 and under” shops dotting the city.
“There are a lot of businesses in this area that just don’t have the ability to survive when they have dramatically less business ,” Plyler said. “And, I mean, who knows what happens as the weather turns colder, because in the summer you’re still able to make money, even though there’s dramatically less people in town.”
Plyler, the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, local government officials, police and residents said most people in the area, including tourists, abide by mask requirements, social distancing and sanitation protocols. There will always be a few cases of people who don’t want to follow the rules, they said, but those are exceptions to the norm that regularly seem to turn into viral posts on social media, further damaging the city’s reputation.
Along Boardwalk at the Beach and the main strip of shops along Ocean Boulevard on Tuesday, most people who were out and about, as well as business employees, wore masks when inside, except for one bartender at an indoor restaurant who declined to comment on the establishment’s health and safety protocols.
To both combat the area’s reputation as a coronavirus hot spot, local chambers of commerce, businesses and other organizations throughout the Grand Strand created GreaterGrandStrandIsOpen.com, a website where residents, visitors and businesses can sign a pledge to follow health and safety guidance provided by authorities. Signors are then listed on the site.
By creating this list, visitors and residents can also have a better idea of which businesses in the area are safe to go to, said Karen Riordan, CEO of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce.
Riordan asks that visitors slow down and be patient with businesses as they do their best to protect both guests and their employees.
“That restaurant that they might want to go into might still be at 50% capacity, so it might be crowded when they want to go,” Riordan said. “So they’re going to need to think about an alternative option— come back at a later time or go back to their hotel room and order that food, but order it to go so they could go back and just pick it up and take it out and maybe have a picnic on the beach.”
Some of the areas largest tourist attractions, including WonderWorks theme park and the Hard Rock Cafe on Boardwalk at the Beach as well as Ripley Entertainment, which has locations across the city, each signed the Greater Grand Strand Promise pledge.
Smaller Labor Day crowds than past years
Data from Coastal Carolina University show hotel, condo and campground occupancy rates hovering at approximately 53% for this entire week. That’s down from about 70% this time in 2018; last year, a hurricane disrupted Labor Day weekend.
The Myrtle Beach Tourism Facebook page saw a lot of activity leading up to the holiday weekend. Tourists from across the Carolinas asked for recommendations for restaurants, shops and beaches to go to. In response to a post asking how people felt about dangers posed by the coronavirus, several soon-to-be visitors said case counts were finally low enough that they weren’t worried about getting infected.
Charleston resident Brooke Woody said in an interview that she planned to take a day trip to Myrtle Beach for Labor Day. While she found concerns about the virus to be valid, she said she and her family can’t just stay indoors forever.
“I think the biggest thing is going to be feeling out of the crowd,” Woody said. “We’re not hyper vigilant about it, but at the same time, we’re not just going to run out where’s there’s 500 people not social distancing and crowding.”
As for residents, Cynthia Cobb of North Myrtle Beach said she wasn’t worried about the influx of visitors, noting that traffic had remained mostly calm on recent weekends because of the overall decrease in tourists this year.
But as a local, Cobb said she wouldn’t be going out to touristy areas anyway, even if there wasn’t a pandemic, just to avoid the crowds.
“It’s like, when you’re local, you know the roads to stay off of and you know where to make the left turn onto 17,” Cobb said. “And then, it’s kind of on steroids when you consider that we’re dealing with COVID and you’re trying to stay away from crowds.”
What visitors should keep in mind
For anyone looking to travel to the Grand Strand this weekend, Horry County and Myrtle Beach officials stressed the need to keep in mind that health and safety precautions vary from one city, or county, to the next. Visitors need to research rules and regulations anywhere they want to go before visiting.
The lack of centralized information on varying rules was one major lesson local leaders learned after Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, Horry County spokeswoman Kelly Moore said. After that, local leaders and government officials worked together to create more cohesive health and safety guides for the area. Now, for example, residents and visitors can go to the VisitMyrtleBeach.com for information on rules in several municipalities.
“Trying to make it easy for folks to figure out what they need and what they should be doing is something that has increased as things have gone on,” Moore said. “On the whole, we’ve seen positive participation from folks; we’ve seen visitors being respectful of those guidelines. ... We want people to come and visit, but we also want them to follow all of these safety practices so we can keep them and our community safe.”
The South Carolina Emergency Management Division also offers an interactive map of counties and local municipalities that require masks to be worn inside businesses.
“Everyone needs to do their part to protect themselves and others from this deadly virus,” SCEMD said in a statement. “South Carolinians are encouraged to relax at home or in an outdoor setting like the beach while avoiding group gatherings. Stay physically distanced by six feet, wear a mask, don’t go out in public if you’re sick at all, and wash your hands immediately after returning home from a public setting and/or use hand sanitizer in the car.”
Bouncing back from a slow spring, summer
It will take awhile for the area’s reputation, and tourist traffic, to recover, business owners worry. Not only did Myrtle Beach make national headlines in June for the high number of cases connected to tourist travel, the region was just coming off a rash of violent crimes — five high-profile shootings from May to mid-June, including a fatal Memorial Day shooting.
It was a double-whammy of bad news that Plyler, whose business on Ocean Boulevard was near all of the shootings, said she saw directly impact business at the Gay Dolphin.
“For the first time ever, we were busier in June when we were in July. That’s just not normal for our type of business. That’s just not normal,” Plyler said.
While Labor Day may serve as a symbolic end to tourist season, experts who look at the tourism economy in the area say the season has begun to stretch into October and start as early as March in recent years.
And businesses have begun to rely on that extra revenue.
With the latter half of March, the entire month of April and part of May lost to coronavirus shutdowns, local businesses that live and die on tourism revenue have struggled.
As a result, Riordan said business owners she works with hope tourists keep coming for several more weeks to help fill the coffers of restaurants, hotels, stores and more that don’t yet have enough money stowed away to survive winter.
Those same tourists, and Grand Strand residents themselves, need to stay safe and healthy, Riordan said, lest the region see another economically devastating surge of coronavirus infections.
“We don’t want to see that increase in business at the expense of public health,” Riordan said. “The last thing that we need is another surge in cases.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 1:07 PM.
