April 2, 2020 — The state’s fishing industry has been financially impacted by COVID-19 but it provided an unexpected benefit for consumers. United Fishing Agency runs the auction at Pier 38 every morning. The manager says they started to feel the effects around mid-March when restaurants were ordered to go take-out only. At one point, ahi dropped to about $1 per pound, that’s about a 500 percent drop from normal prices.
As expected, sales at restaurants and hotels have gone down during the coronavirus outbreak and the fishing industry is adapting to a new normal by changing up the way they do business.
“You see a lot of businesses selling retail, slabs of fish that normally wouldn’t have done in a regular market,” Michael Goto, United Fishing Agency auction manager, said. “It really hurts everybody. It hurts the vessels, it hurts us here at the auctions.”
Goto believes how well his industry does depends on how tourism is doing so he’s unsure when numbers will go back to normal.