This is the biggest problem we have right now, in my mind.
The Illinois governor just locked down bars and restaurants in several counties again today. Some of them have already announced permanent closure.
ALREADY.
No indoor dining = no customers. It's too cold to sit outside now, so those owners are screwed, along their employees and suppliers.
We need to learn to live with this thing and not let the cure be worse than the cause. It's depressing.
A huge number of restaurants in Austin have patios, outdoor dining is the norm, so that helps. And almost anyone with outdoor dining, has outdoor heaters and plastic screening to improve warmth, which covers everything but the very coldest few days in the heart of winter. Honestly, here, the summer is worse than the Fall/Winter/Spring for outdoor dining, because there's just no good way to cool off a patio when it's 105 degrees outside.
But the bars-- they're pretty much toast. Back in June, the local fishwrap published a story that 90% of bars would be permanently closed by the end of the year, if restrictions remained in place. I'd say we're about halfway there, with no realistic end in sight. 25 or 50% capacity just isn't going to cut it for them. And the large festivals like ACL Fest in October, and SXSW that was canceled last March, drive a ton of their revenue. In a business where margins are thin, some places can ONLY turn an annual profit based on income they get from those two weeks. Sort of the way retail stores are pretty much in the red all year, and make their annual profits at Christmas.
But there's an important key to remember. The fact that restaurants or bars CAN be open doesn't mean that they're going to get customers showing up.
Bars and restaurants base their ability to stay afloat partially on a certain occupancy level, and even if every state and locality completely eliminated their restrictions, I would guess that those bars and restaurants wouldn't hit those occupancy levels because people are trying to be safe.
Here in California, I don't care whether they open up indoor dining or not; I have no intent on going to eat indoor in a restaurant. A few weeks back I had a day off so my wife took a day off and we did a Friday date lunch. The restaurant said when she made the reservation that they couldn't guarantee outdoor seating, and my wife told them "that's fine but if there aren't tables outside when we get there we'll go somewhere else."
A lot of people are like us; they aren't going for indoor dining anywhere. A lot of people may go for indoor dining, but are trying to keep their nights dining out to a minimum or only for very special occasion due to the risk. A lot of people who may have paired indoor dining with other date events (movies, concerts, theater) don't have those other events to go to, so they're not going to go to a restaurant.
None of this requires that people stay home 100% of the time, but if every person that normally would go out X amount of times per month are only going out to eat 25% of X per month, it kills the restaurants anyway.
As I've said before, this is going to be a shit sandwich for restaurants and bars regardless of what we do regarding government-mandated lockdowns or occupancy limits. Because I believe that enough people are changing their behavior voluntarily that many of them will go under regardless of what the government says. It'll be blamed on lockdowns, of course. But that doesn't mean that they would have been full if there were no lockdowns in the middle of a pandemic.