As of Friday, June 19, employees of St. Petersburg businesses were required to wear masks by an executive order of St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman.
The order requires all businesses located in St. Petersburg to ensure that employees wear face masks or coverings while in spaces that are open to the public.
“I just want to make people laugh,” said Shapiro, a St. Pete native who is also the general manager of Shapiro’s Gallery on Beach Drive. “I always resort to humor when things get tense. Humor is my outlet.”
When Rob Stambaugh was a boy, his job was to sweep up the family business every night, once the last customer had departed and the buzzing, backlit sign out front was turned off.
In the early 1960s, Stambaugh’s father Ted was the general manager of the London Wax Museum, one of the first tourist attractions on St. Petersburg Beach.
While many businesses are struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic, blockchain technology development studio BlockSpaces is moving forward with a new operating model, a new management team and a seed round of capital.
“COVID allowed us to make the big changes that would have been hard to do in the peak of season. So in a weird way there’s been a lot of silver-lining blessings with this whole thing. We were able to pivot to things more aligned to our value system.”
The racial disparity data for Pinellas County paints a bleak picture: Blacks are 3.85 times (2.37 times in Hillsborough County) more likely to be COVID-19 positive than whites.
