It’s insane to me that we don’t just make masks 100% mandatory when you’re outside your own home. We don’t have exact numbers on how effective masks are, but when everyone is wearing them, evidence suggests “very effective.” Anecdotal examples - a man with a dry cough, that was later diagnosed to be COVID, wore a mask on the long flight from Wuhan to Toronto, had extended/close contact with 25 people, but he was wearing a mask, and none of them contracted it from him [1]. 2 hairdressers in Missouri had COVID, but they and their clients all wore masks, they had extended close contact with 140 people and none of them got COVID [2]. We know masks are most effective when the infected person wears them, and we know that asymptomatic spreaders are common, so really we just need everyone wearing masks for all close personal interactions.<p>We could keep the economy decently open AND keep COVID cases down dramatically with a simple law to mandate masks 100% of the time when outside your own home. In plenty of professions people are wearing masks all day long now, it’s uncomfortable at first, but you get used to it. Crazy that this isn’t being strongly considered.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410" rel="nofollow">https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-salons-missouri/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...</a>
It seems strikingly brazen for the landlords to start asking for full rent in this market. Even before covid, vacant storefronts were sitting on the market for months or years due to retail and banking moving online[1]. Good luck finding someone who wants to start a new restaurant in the next 9 months or so. Even if they think they can force the current tenant into bankruptcy and collect, there won't be much to collect after taking away the tenant's only income stream.<p>It all just feels very short-sighted.<p>[1] see, e.g., from 2018: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-storefront-vacancy.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-...</a>
>><i>Between early March and early May, roughly 110,000 small businesses nationwide shut down, according to researchers at Harvard.</i><p>I tracked down the paper[1] they referenced and Table 5 was an eye opener. While "only" 110K small businesses were estimated to have shut down out of 30M[2] small businesses nationwide (0.37%), the really grim survey results are summarized in Table 5 of the paper titled "Reported Likelihood of Remaining Open by Industry and Hypothetical Crisis Duration". The restaurant/bar/catering category surveyed back in late March believed their chance of survival would only be 0.15 if the shutdowns lasted through to December.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w26989.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nber.org/papers/w26989.pdf</a><p>[2] <a href="https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/23142610/2019-Small-Business-Profiles-States-Territories.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2314...</a>
Is there any proven mechanism to put a segment of society "on-pause" for while? Each business entity submits a hibernation plan to central authority, funds provided and liabilities put on hold by decree. What do governments do historically during sieges and plagues?<p>Are we doomed to live through these boom-bust cycles over and over again?
This is why S&P stocks are rising. Consumers will still need to buy, but the pandemic will drive massive consolidation to large firms that can weather the financial strain.
What percent of small businesses fail every year?<p>To understand the damage, you have to know how what the baseline closure rate is. I am not sure what the rate is in the restaurant industry, but it seems extremely high even in regular times.
Many small businesses have signed personal guarantees on their commercial leases, meaning that landlords will come after them even after they've closed.<p>Restaurants for example will often have 5-10 year lease terms.
> “It’s the most frustrating situation because it’s not about passion anymore or the work you put in or the hours you put in,” he said. “It’s all about the mitigating circumstances that are out of your control.”<p>this is generally true about business. if the regulatory environment, the marketing is good, or the loan office is good (etc), you get lucky. if a celebrity likes your yoghurt. etc.<p>hard work is the other side of this, but the role of luck is huge.<p>anyway, looks like we're headed into the first real bust in a long long time.
This might actually be a good thing in the long run. Real estate prices in NYC were insane before the pandemic, landlords would purposefully keep property off the market and toss out long established businesses on hopes of scoring a payday from a new renter. Now we are in a situation where it is just impossible to pack enough people into a space to earn a profit at $3700 per square foot. No doubt it will cause some people a lot of pain up front but eventually it might be possible for small businesses and families to be in Manhattan again.
Another source of some sobering figures was the NYC Hospitality Alliance which just published their July Rent Report. 83% of respondents did not pay their full rent in July and 37% of respondents reported they paid no rent.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://thenycalliance.org/assets/documents/informationitems/jlBDT.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://thenycalliance.org/assets/documents/informationitems...</a>
It's so disheartening to see both Cuomo and DeBlasio's absolutely pathetic response to the pandemic - really on every level, but in the case of this article, the economic response.<p>Nearly every other city has taken major steps to make it easier for people to spend time outdoors, for restaurants and bars to serve patrons outdoors, assistance programs for local small businesses, and so forth. By contrast, DeBlasio has been chipping <i>away</i> at Open Streets, cancelled Summer Streets, and both he and Cuomo have been actively impeding restaurants and bars from adapting to serve food and alcohol outdoors.<p>They've insisted that bars cannot serve alcohol without serving "real food" (nachos doesn't count), which is a huge blow to bars which don't have a full kitchen. Even for restaurants and bars which do, though, they've been incredibly aggressive with issuing citations. Many have complained that, if a server clears the empty dinner plates before patrons are finished with their drinks, state inspectors will cite them because "there's no food", even though the bill shows that they were charged for dinner. Others have complained that the city has cited them for "violations", but unlike the health inspectors, doesn't actually provide a list of the offenses that need to be corrected.<p>In addition, they've provided ~zero financial assistance for small businesses - particularly bars and restaurants, which are hit the hardest. That's in stark contrast to other cities in the US and elsewhere, which have given direct cash assistance to help them weather the crisis.<p>It's a disaster all around, and neither the governor nor the mayor have shown any interest in taking meaningful steps to support the state's largest economy. (Cuomo has done a better job at framing his actions to the press, but when you actually look at what he's done, he's done a really awful job).
> "She asked her landlord for a break on her $6,000 a month rent, but he refused. Ms. Dillon said she decided in early April to close down."<p>Commercial evictions have been stopped in New York since March. It seems like a lot of people underestimate their bargaining power in a pandemic. Who else is the landlord going to rent to anyway?
We may only be halfway, one third or less into this pandemic.<p>I really hope that<p>1) the early vaccines will work<p>2) other mitigation strategies (masks, social distancing, quick tests at scale etc) will succeed in keeping R under 1 and small businesses above breakeven in case we're in for another 1-2 years of covid flare ups<p>If the above don't work, we could be looking at mass unemployment, unbearable private and government debt, and more civil unrest
This is what Lenin said about financial capitalism and monopoly. Every boom-bust cycle, endemic to capitalism, results in further consolidation. The free market / small producer capitalism that everyone says they like died around the 1880s-1890s when large firms began to dominate. Everything said in favor of that form since then has been essentially nostalgia for a lost time that wasn't even that good to begin with.<p>If the trust busters don't come back, we will see essentially a kind of feudalist economy develop around a few extraordinarily powerful companies as every ladder is pulled up behind them and smaller institutions are "creatively destroyed".<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage...</a>