Working three jobs hasn’t been enough to protect service industry worker Kelli Rowe from the economic damage Tropical Storm Helene inflicted on Buncombe County.
Rowe’s shifts three days a week at a West Asheville bar shrank to one, her work for a caterer virtually dried up, and the country club where she works in the dining room was scheduled to close for three weeks over the holidays.
Rowe, a 42-year-old Oakley resident, worked out extended payment plans for her power bill and her auto loan. Her landlord gave her a break on rent, even turning away one payment Rowe offered. “She told me to keep it and … to use it to get through Christmas,” Rowe said.
Still, Rowe says there are some bills like car insurance and cellphone — a must for a job seeker — that she said she has no choice but to pay.
“I constantly feel like I’m moving the pennies around right now to make ends meet,” she says.
Many people in service industry jobs in the area, especially those tied to tourism, are having similar financial struggles, and many fear that at least the first two months of 2025 will be even worse.
The number of people unemployed in Buncombe County jumped by almost 12,000 from September to October, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce. That Helene-induced shift moved the county from having one of the lowest jobless rates in the state in September at 2.5% to the highest rate in October, recently adjusted to 10.4%. The unemployment rate fell to 7.2% in November.
It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for local workers in tourism-related jobs. October and July are ordinarily the two most lucrative months for the local tourism industry and its workers, and a busy October provides a needed financial cushion for the lean times after the first of the year. As Rowe puts it, “October is the money that’s going to get us through the winter.”
A sort-of recovery
Many tourism-related businesses that were hobbled by Helene or the loss of potable water service had reopened by the middle of December, but anecdotal reports suggest the level of activity they are seeing is often well below normal.
At downtown restaurant Huli Sue’s BBQ & Grill, bar manager Orion Milligan says customer traffic there has “been very up and down. It feels like there are some tourists coming back, but sales definitely are not like they were this time last year.”
Meghan Rogers, executive director of the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association, hears similar stories from many of her group’s members. “It seems to be a mix for restaurants,” she says. “Some people have been able to hire back most of their … staff while others are operating on limited hours with limited menus.”
Woodfin resident Kasey Hotchkiss says sales at her small guided tour company, Asheville Detours, were down 90% as of mid-December.
Customers canceled plans for tours after Helene, and “People had already made their holiday plans [to go elsewhere] by the time the water came back on,” she says. As of mid-December, Detour Asheville had led only one tour since Helene and just one more booked “and that’s all.”
Hotchkiss said her post-Helene experience has “definitely not been the most fun roller coaster I’ve been on, but I’m holding on and hoping for the best.”
She had success in late 2024 with an Asheville Detours sideline, selling holiday gift boxes of items produced in the Asheville area. She benefited from donations from family and friends, unemployment benefits, food stamps, a business loan through Mountain BizWorks and a weekend fundraiser at the Rankin Vault Cocktail Lounge in downtown Asheville in which half the proceeds from certain cocktails went to Asheville Detours.
Hotchkiss appreciates the help but says her finances are still shaky and she is reluctant to borrow more money. She is seeking grants instead.
For small-business owners like herself hurt by Helene, “Loans aren’t that helpful in the long run because it’s really just putting us more in debt,” she says. “We were all very responsible business owners. We just hit bad luck.”
The chill ahead
As difficult as it has been financially to get through the end of 2024, Rowe said in mid-December that she worried even more about what’s next for herself and many others.
“I’m terrified of January and February, what the cold months are going to mean for this community,” Rowe says.
Buncombe County’s unemployment rate was higher each January than the month before in every year since at least 1991. Service industry employees who do keep their jobs after New Year’s Day often get fewer work hours and smaller paychecks.
The local tourism industry is not as seasonal as it once was, thanks in part to the rise of downtown Asheville as a destination and the growth of breweries, arts and crafts businesses, and other attractions not as dependent on good weather.
Still, the government statistics and service workers’ stories reflect this assessment by Gay Weber, chief operating officer at Carolina Mornings, a vacation rental company. “It’s just a hard sell to get people to come to Asheville in the winter.”
The Asheville-based company lowered rates on the rentals it manages, but reservations for the first part of 2025 were only about 65% or 70% of where they were a year before, he said last month.
Unless that trend changes, it is inevitable that paychecks for housekeepers, for example, will be lower this winter. “If a guest doesn’t come and stay, there’s nothing to clean,” Weber says.
Even in good economic times, wages for many tourism-related jobs are lower than in other sectors of the local economy. Industry workers’ finances were squeezed a few years ago by the pandemic, and many are challenged by the high cost of housing in the area.
Oteen resident Mary Katherine MacGregor, 52, says it is difficult for people in food and beverage jobs to bank savings to see them through events like Helene or provide retirement income.
“I don’t think a lot of us really thought about the future. You just kind of struggle through,” she says. “I know folks in their 60s who are still working full time in this industry [and] don’t have a retirement fund.”
MacGregor broke her ankle in June that put her out of work for much of this year. She had planned to return last fall to her job as a host in a downtown bar, but it did not reopen after Helene.
She counts herself as lucky because she sold her home in 2024 and has been living on the proceeds, but that is not a perfect solution. “That was my retirement money. I was definitely not planning on spending it” on living expenses, she says.
Should I stay?
Faced with uncertainty about a slow winter, many service industry workers have moved away.
Several drivers who used to work at local delivery service Kickback AVL have left, owner Jennie Townsend says. “They left because their homes were damaged and they didn’t have anywhere to go back to.”
Hotchkiss, the Detour Asheville owner, says if she doesn’t get some grant money in 2025 or see an uptick in bookings, “I’m definitely facing the prospect of closing my business.” She opened it in 2017.
She hopes that would not force her to move. “I don’t see myself leaving Asheville,” she says. “I very much love Asheville, but I’ll have to do what I have to do and follow wherever that leads me.”
Although people think of Asheville as a tourist town, health care employs more people than tourism in Buncombe and three adjoining counties.
Nathan Ramsey, director of Land of Sky Regional Council’s Mountain Area Workforce Development Board, says there are available jobs in the Asheville area and programs to match job seekers with employers and provide worker training.
Ramsey said many workers seeking to leave tourism for other fields can find jobs that match their skill sets and previous pay.
He says if service workers move away, that’s “where our economy will really take a hit.”
Alanah Rempel, a former tour guide for Hotchkiss’ company, already made that call. She was working as a cook at a restaurant in Chattanooga, Tenn., in December and plans to start a permanent job in Huntsville, Ala., this month.
Before Helene, Rempel, 32, had been making ends meet by working her version of what Hotchkiss calls “the Asheville hustle.” She worked at a local hostel in exchange for housing, was a cook at Dobra Tea’s West Asheville location and was one of four contract tour guides at Asheville Detours.
Originally from Colorado, Rempel had worked in several states before coming to Asheville in 2023. She had thought of staying here longer. “I had been looking into apartments and things in Asheville before the hurricane and, oof, it’s expensive.”
But when Helene hit, she says she had less than $100 in her bank account, and “all of my jobs kind of came to a halt.”
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