In other news, the number of restaurants not reopened around us is concerning, many of them have posted notices that they are permanently done.
One opened and has closed because two of their staff tested positive.
We peek in the nicer places that reopened and they have almost no one seated inside. We dined at South City Kitchen the other day, their sister down the street Lure is not open, and they had a 20% surcharge on the menu that I questioned, it was basically to help the place out. The server said he had been out of work 91 days. I left a large cash tip.
A noodle place just opened and is quite good, we dined there last night. A burger place opened just before this happened and they seem to be hanging in, the other burger place is still closed. (The best burger place near us is open and crowded, again, limited parking and hard to get into.)
The French restaurant is open and has outdoor seating which is a bit close to a busy street but we dine outside preferably.
We go there for the atmosphere.
This is what pie in the sky looney tunes people like OAM have no idea about. The economic crunch hasn’t even begun to truly hit home yet. There is an apocalypse of mortgage foreclosures, renter evictions, and small businesses shuttering their doors coming unless the federal govt steps in and pushes forward some kind of debt/rent forgiveness plan.
I just did a build out on a second location on of one of the top rated restaurants in the entire country on TripAdvisor right before all this coronavirus hit. The original is a tiny little place but it’s super popular- always packed and the owner was showing me emails from ESPN, Fox Sports, CNN, and MGM Studios- all tried booking the place for private vip dinner parties and the owner told them all no because the place was so tiny and didn’t have a bar.
His rent on the shoebox was $10k+ a month. And we’re talking a place that’s dining room area isn’t even 500 sq ft. He was so busy and turning over the tables and cash flowing so much, it wasn’t a problem.
Well he went to open another, much larger location with a bar and spent a small fortune to do so, and his rent is close to $30k a month on the second location- and the landlord is a massive company that owns a prime piece of retail in an in demand location so they gave
him just 1 month of free rent. Takes a lot longer than 1 month to do a build-out. Obviously. And this guy was also in the process of hiring 50+ new people to work at the new restaurant. Coronavirus hit, we stopped construction and he still owes me a chuck of money - and he’s been closed for 3 months and has been paying his landlord at the new location $30k a month for not being open- and another $10k a month at the other location. And these landlords are huge companies that own prime real estate and give no breaks. He’s got to pay, he’s personally guaranteed the lease and put up his other restaurant as collateral. The rental agreement is like 70 pages- insane, ironclad all in favor of the landlord.
He’s shuttered his doors for 3 months, he’s been paying $40k a month for 3 straight months to landlords- so that’s $120,000+ all for the privilege of not being open, he’s got 0 cash flow, and he didn’t take the PPP bc it’s really risky for restaurants apparently- he’s been paying his staff out of pocket mainly bc it’s a very small staff and they are like a family.
He finally reopened a couple weeks ago, and if another lockdown happens it’ll probably wipe him out.
This is one guy but there are literally TENS and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small business owners like him all over this country teetering on the brink and they all employee people- and it’s a big chain reaction if they all go down. And the fed isn’t standing behind them propping them up in secret with zero oversight with a printing press to bail them out like they are doing with big business/Wall Street/PE. Why do you think the stock market isn’t in the tank? The FED is juicing the market. The FED fired up the printing presses, cut interest rates to zero, went on a buying spree and bought up junk bonds, mortgage backed securities, and has been using it’s emergency lending facility in secret to prop up the mega-business/wall street/PE in the the last 3-4 months. Zero oversight, zero cap- literally unlimited spending. At one point in March for almost half a week they were buying as much $75 billion A DAY in treasuries alone. $75 billion a day.
Yet the PPP and EIDL for small business was capped and needed to go through the process of getting funding added. Go figure. Lol. And not to mention those loans all go through the banking system and not directly to end user- which means the banks made billions and billions in free money just for processing paper work.
IMF is predicting the US economy to contract by 8% in 2020.
Shit hasn’t even begun to gotten real yet. This is going to be BAD. And if there are any more lockdowns it will go from BAD to end of times. It’ll be the Great Depression all f****ing over again and an entire generation of young people will be lost.