France Bleu Bourgogne: Hello Gilbert Febvay, you are the representative of the nightlife at Umih in Côte d’Or, you are also the owner of the Beverly in Dijon. It’s a night bar, a dance bar. Like nightclubs, are you concerned about the closure or will you be able to stay open?
Gilbert Febvay: As we have exactly the same job as a disco, in the logic of things, I think we will be closed as well. There were distinctions, it caused a lot of controversy because some people tried to do their best, others took advantage of it and that made some distortions with the discotheques. And I think that there will be everyone in the same basket. In the logic of things, because it’s exactly the same job.
Do you understand this decision of the Prime Minister?
We are having a little trouble because we know that there will be a lot of private parties that are going to be organized, the New Year’s Eve is coming to us. From the start, we control the sanitary pass, and the identity document which was an obligation for night bars to have late closing hours until 5am. Until checking the identity document to be sure that customers have a real health pass. And besides, we saw a lot of them who had a fake, but we turned them back.
But despite all this, the latest studies show that nightclubs are one of the places where we get infected.
I am not sure that we infect ourselves more than elsewhere. At home, for example, there were no more cases than elsewhere. I have not had a case, but I have not had alerts from the Regional Health Agency, saying to myself, “there is a big contamination, there is a cluster at your place.”
Financially, will it be complicated for you and for the other Côte d’Or establishments? Or should the aid promised by the government still be enough to keep you going?
We will already see the help we have on atmosphere bars. If there is ever no help for the atmospheric bars, I think it will stay open and there will be spillovers. Now, if we have help, we’ll do our best. It will be borderline, it will be just because it falls in the big holiday periods when we work well.
–
