Are restaurants basically a memory now?
Closing in on two months into COVID 19 lockdown and I personally can't wait for everything to re-open. However, when that happens, the same restaurants I used to enjoy going to won't be there.
Restaurants are already a mostly risky/low-profit margin business. Will restaurants like the ones we used to go to still pop up, or do you see new services forming to fill this gap?
People still need to socialize, and socializing over food has been a key aspect of being human. How will we adapt?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 14.6 ms ] threadSome people are learning to cook during the epidemic, as much for entertainment as anything else, and some of them will keep cooking. Also some eat-in business will go to delivery.
It isn't hard in principle to hibernate restaurants since the main cost is labor. You give the workers enhanced unemployment insurance, the restaurant stops paying the rent, the landlord and/or mortgage holder might get a bailout the same way the employees get unemployment insurance, etc.
Some would say that we are eating too much as restaurants and it is making us fat, causing diabetes, etc. Women entering the workforce has had a number of ecological impacts on the society which are rarely discussed (Liz Warren's "Two Income Trap" is a counterexample.) Dual income couples are not just paying more for mortgages and restaurant meals but for also for insulin and payments to their morticians are coming sooner.