Bill Duggan, owner of Madam’s Organ, a blues bar in Washington, D.C., has been among the business owners in the capital city pitching an idea to open at 100% capacity – as long as staff and patrons have been vaccinated.
On May 1, Mayor Muriel Bowser is letting venues and bars with live entertainment partially reopen (at 25% capacity), according to Washington City Paper, however, Duggan’s won’t be one of them. “Unless I can figure out a way to hang my customers on the wall, there is just no way we can have a crowd in there,” he said.
Bowser has reportedly not given any indication of when businesses can operate at 100% capacity again, so business owners like Duggan have been making their own pleas and suggestions.
“The government doesn’t have to say everybody has to have a vaccine card,” he said. “They have too many objections to that. But we as business owners should be able to. I have it that nobody’s allowed to wear a baseball hat in my place. We’re not discriminating on anything – race, religion, sexual orientation. We are trying to keep our people safe, as well as everybody that comes in here. And by doing so, I think that we can do a lot of their work for them, by giving people incentive to be vaccinated.”
