I don’t follow you. Do you think that the majority of restaurants that have gone under this year would have gone under in a normal year?
We weren’t discussing whether lives are more or less resurrectable than restaurants. Bringing that up doesn’t seem a good way to judge the economic impacts of shutdowns.
Neither is : “it’s mostly the old who die, I’m not old so who cares? Let ‘em die so I won’t be inconvenienced or bored”.
Yeah, that’s true. But I didn’t do that. I don’t think analogies between people and businesses is useful at all.
You may think you don’t…
No, I don’t. I am very much on board with vaccinating the oldest first. Merely mentioning what age group is likeliest to die isn’t remotely being indifferent to it.
In April, November, and December (so far), Covid-19 has been the LEADING cause of death in the US. Imagine what it would be like if half the country was like SayTwo? People like SayTwo benefit from people like us just like anti-vaxxers are benefitting from people who vaccinate.
If you have a way of keeping restaurants open and keeping people from dying I’d love to hear it. It’s not like either alternative is good - just that people count more.
I’m over 65, and so directly affected by this, but I’m all for vaccinating essential workers (like supermarket people) before me. I can hide out still, they can’t.
Me too. My social security will arrive in my bank account and I can buy food and cat food and pay the mortgage without having to show up at work, many others can’t. Vaccinate them first. I’m very willing to bare-ass just stay at home, sequester from gatherings and be a titch lonely and bored since others are also doing their part.
Exactly! Beyond the creative destruction aspect, restaurants are fundamentally a low barrier to entry industry. It just doesn’t take that much money, skill, or experience to open a restaurant. That’s why we see a constant low to medium level of turnover in terms of restaurant openings and closings in normal times. COVID is just applying pressure in a different direction than normal- it’s more than likely making it harder to stay open and be profitable, and therefore putting the brakes on a lot of people’s plans to open new restaurants.
What’s going to happen I suspect is that it’ll slow commensurately with the level of access by consumers- i.e. can we go to restaurants at 50% capacity, 25% capacity, takeout only, etc… but that once the majority of people are vaccinated and things go more or less back to normal, we’ll see a burst of new restaurants opening(all those people who held off for a year plus) , and then sometime later, a burst of them shutting down because they didn’t succeed for various reasons, and then we’ll settle back into that same constant low-medium churn with openings and closings.
Just because restaurants were long-time fixtures in their communities doesn’t necessarily say a whole lot about their health as a business, or their robustness in that sense. I mean, a restaurant may have been just scraping by for decades on the virtue of their long-term regular customers, and COVID was the thing that tipped them into non-profitability. Or possibly their restaurant model wasn’t one that would support takeout very well.
To use a local example, Highland Park Cafeteria was a 95 year old restaurant that was doing “ok” until COVID hit, and then had to close their doors in May. To me and my MBA, that strikes me as a business that was running extremely thin margins and had no room for error if they had to shut their doors that soon. Certainly the cafeteria model doesn’t lend itself to takeout, but I get the impression that the loss of steady income from regular customers was more than they could bear, even if they did try to go with takeout to make up some of the loss.
Meanwhile plenty of other restaurants have managed to keep their doors open one way or another, or have mothballed themselves for the duration.
Yes. In fact, I suspect some of the really savvy people just shut down early rather than bleed out slowly. They will reopen later. Maybe not the same restaurant, but a restaurant.
It really is going to vary enormously. In my community I can cite three examples, all quality restaurants:
1.) A taqueria, which was already 99.9% takeout. Rose out of a successful food truck, has a truly tiny storefront with a couple of tables on the sidewalk out front. Undoubtedly business is down because of a shrinking lunch crowd, but they continue to seem pretty busy with lines out the door and far as I can tell are doing okay.
2.) A Thai place, previously primarily a sit-down lunch and dinner restaurant with a decent takeout side business. Stayed open entire time doing take-out and briefly a little sidewalk dining, that part now shutdown again. According to owner a few months back just scraping by on about 60% of previous take. Not thriving, but not at the breaking point yet.
3.) The largest, a Latin-fusion place. Sit down breakfast, lunch, dinner and weekend brunch. Heavily dependent on rush crowds, especially breakfast/brunch - got very full on weekends in particular. Shut down at first quarantine and tried to ride it out. When that didn’t work opened up a few months into the pandemic as a takeout place, later briefly able to open their patio. But they always operated with a limited menu and were the most dependent on out-of-town brunch crowds and the like.
From thriving and popular pre-pandemic they dropped to about 25% of former income. Despite considerable in-community support and goodwill they simply couldn’t make it work and shut down a couple of weeks back, probably for good.
I think this is a tragedy and I think something like the Restaurant Relief Bill is merited to help keep these places afloat. I am not so blase about new places rushing in to fill the void quickly. You do lose something in the community when quality places disappear. I’m still smarting over my favorite Levantine place going under years back and the crappy chain sushi place that replaced it is an insult to its hallowed memory 
.
But that doesn’t mean we should prioritize easing quarantine just for the sake business, especially with vaccines arriving. Rather we need to prioritize giving them economic support as above until it is safe to open back up.
Outdoor dining was probably ok during lower periods. I agree bars open in most of the country is a bad idea right now.
But it’s not all or nothing. Parts of the economy are going to run regardless. It’s proper to try and analyze economic impacts in different sectors and that discussion shouldn’t be shutdown by cries of people dying and those businesses prolly woulda failed anyway. Oh and my favorite "nobody would go to these businesses anyway in a pandemic ".
The argument isn’t “nobody”. The argument is that a year or more of severely depressed economic activity is way worse than 6 weeks of no economic activity. A trickle of economic activity basically is the worst of a world’s because it allows the virus to rage without really counteracting the economic effects.
Ok, well we should be able to say that lockdowns ended successful businesses without it being taken as an argument for “let 'er rip”.
Well, COVID ended successful people, too. The argument that not all businesses killed during COVID were otherwise thriving is a direct response to the claim that COVID deaths aren’t “as bad as they seem” because “people that die from COVID only lost a few years”. That argument seems to assume all economic damage was entirely COVID related but potential mitigating factors in loss of life must be calculated out 10 decimal places and a regression analysis applied before we can take them into account.
See, you’re doing it again. I am not comparing human deaths to business failures.
If we are trying to envision a useful economic relief plan, it doesn’t matter that successful people died. It does matter that successful businesses failed.
But this of course assumes that a very stringent lockdown of six weeks or something of that order will then clear the way for things to be eternally somewhat safe again, and that doesn’t appear to be anything approaching a certainty.
As it happens, you have a place like California with the worst of both worlds, with immeasurable damage to lives and livelihoods and with the virus ‘raging’.