Vienna Businesses Lose Sales

Customers seeking to use the stores have to travel through an Exxon parking lot to get to the center. Meanwhile, businesses in the Danor Plaza say they are suffering.

"People call here, and they say, 'I'm surprised you answered the phone, I thought you were closed down,'" said Khourosh Shaun, general manager of That's Amore, an Italian restaurant in the shopping center. Shaun said his restaurant's sales are down 25 percent from last year.

Pulak is down a similar amount, and has had to lay off two of his employees because of the slowdown. Even harder hit was Jeff Stahle's Baskin Robbins, right next door to Cenan's Bakery. Stahle's family has been operating Baskin Robbins franchises in the area for decades.

"We sell ice cream, and the summer is when we do 60 percent of our business," said Stahle, gesturing at the jersey barriers that have walled his parking lot off from the rest of Vienna for the entire season.

"We're down 20 percent from where we were last year, other [Baskin Robbins] stores are up 5 percent. ... This is going to have a huge impact on our year," Stahle said.

According to all of the businesses, the way they found out about the construction was from signs posted in the area just a week before construction on the VDOT project started.

Vienna Director of Public Works Holly Chu said letters of notification were mailed to the two property management companies that operate the center for its owners, but not to the individual businesses most affected by the construction. Vienna and VDOT held a public meeting in the spring to talk about the construction, but the business owners say they didn't know about it.

According to Chu, Vienna's Business Liaison Committee also met to discuss the matter, but the business owners on Branch Road say they didn't know about that meeting, either.

"The first thing I knew about it was when they turned Branch Road into one huge pothole," said Connie Stewart, morning manager at French restaurant Le Canard.

According to VDOT, the work on Branch Road will be done by November, with most of the work finishing next month. However, Shaun and Norm Yow, of Norm's Beer and Wine, say that even larger-scale roadwork on Beulah will continue to affect their businesses. Beulah will not be finished until May of next year.

"It's become very difficult to get here from Tysons Corner, and once you lose regulars for a while, you don't always get them back," Yow said.

Chu called the failure to notify the individual business owners "an oversight" but pointed out that "this was VDOT's project."

"We will definitely walk the letters door to door next time," Chu said.

Meanwhile, the businesses on Branch Road are looking for any help they can get.

"We don't want anything special, we just want Vienna to remember we are still here and that we need their support," Shaun said.

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