By HARRIET RAMOS
Subway owners Tim and Cyndi Pitman are making plans to reopen for the fall semester.
Subway has been closed since March 13, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dallas College officials have not made any formal announcements about the fall semester yet, but if the campus is back to mainly in-person classes, the Pitmans say they are ready to reopen.
“Come fall, we’re ready to go gangbusters,” Tim said in a phone interview.
Their first priority will be to hire new employees. Cyndi said most of their employees have moved on.
She said they will also need to update their menu and get the new employees up to speed on sandwich making before the semester starts Aug. 23.
When the Pitmans left campus last March, they were only planning on a short closure. They had a freezer and refrigerator full of food they had just ordered, 12 cases of chips and sodas to refill the drink machines.
Tim said everything leftover was a total loss. Even the non-perishable items have expired, and their insurance won’t cover losses related to a pandemic.
In spite of the business losses, Cyndi said personally they’ve weathered the storm well.
They spent the entire pandemic in isolation at home, even refraining from celebrating the holidays with their three grown children and one grandchild.
They’ve been living off of retirement and Social Security income and finding plenty to do at home.
Cyndi said they have been working out, rewriting the Subway employee manual and watching television, something they normally don’t have time for.
“When you own a restaurant, it’s very hectic,” she said. “There’s a lot going on all the time, so it took a little adjusting to not have that kind of schedule.”
The Pitmans previously owned four Subways, but now they are down to just the one at Eastfield. They took it over in March 2008.
The Pitmans finished the second round of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in early February and said they are ready to start venturing out again. Six days after receiving their second dose they ate at Pier 101, a seafood restaurant in Rockwall. It was their first time to eat out since last March.
Now they are looking forward to coming back to Eastfield.
“We miss everybody there,” Cyndi said. “I miss seeing the people up in the business office. I miss seeing our regular customers and we miss our students that were employees. . . . We’ll be back. We’re not gone.”
