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The state of the restaurant industry

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Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#121
post #39

The government has talked about bailouts for various industries from airlines, to cruise ships, to shale companies. But almost every sector of the US economy is going to be hit by this and I have no idea how we are going to react. Will there be a restaurant bailout? What would that even look like? It is much easier to work on bailing out a handful of airlines but how do you handle it for literally thousands of small…

SBA just announced a program for loans up to $2M at 3.75% to make payroll

For restaurant owner running on 3-5% margins, when salaries are a significant expense, it would be suicide to take a loan to make payroll; your business would probably never be profitable again. Better to let the business die and reinvent yourself in June/July.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#122

Perhaps US eat-out culture will die, and those who worked those jobs will just have to find some other means by which to negotiate value from the economy.

> find some other means by which to negotiate value from the economy Do people actually talk like this about the livelihood of millions of people in real life, or is an affectation for HN?

Sure, plenty of people do. Head down to the local bow tie store, or visit your nearest seasteading ship and you'll find that almost everyone talks this way. Just be careful not to violate the NAP or you'll be blown away by someone's rocket launcher.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restaurant industry is brittle and consolidating, and the the American middle class might not be strong enough to support it anymore. Recent events just magnify the weaknesses of the existing system. We could talk about things like the expansion of government programs, or we could talk about your theory of how I'm stripping people's humanities away. You would also presume quite poorly if you thought I haven't wor…

The assertion that restaurants failing in the wake of the government mandating them to close in response to a once in a lifetime pandemic is evidence of them being unviable as an industry is utterly laughable.

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Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#126
post #15

I noticed that the global line and the US line are pretty much within 1% of each other the entire time. So really this is US data, since it looks like almost all of their restaurants are in the US. I wouldn't put much stock in the other countries. That being said, this data certainly shows a devastating trend for the restaurant industry.

Not sure about the rest of Canada, but they have a significant share of restaurants in the GTA and most of Ontario.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#127

I can't understand why would somebody think that putting latest data on the left is a good idea.

I thought the same thing. More than anything, having the data in a table without a basic time series graph makes it harder to visualize the impact (for me).

The use of saturation of the background of the cell to indicate the severity makes it a combination of heatmap and table. Given the number of series in the data, this is actually probably a superior view of the data than trying to plot all the time series in a single line graph (it's dangerous to push beyond 6, IMHO), or devoting a single line graph to each comparison point.

Tables are a vastly underrated means of conveying data.

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#129

>the cascading economic impact from just this one sector will be enormous. The entire hospitality industry is going to take a huge hit. I do work in the convention, corporate travel/event space, and my calendar up until June has been wiped out. Cascading is the key thing people seem to gloss over. Sure, servers and kitchen staff are obvious. The food delivery people will not be needed. Companies like Aramark that pro…

[deleted]

Re: The state of the restaurant industry

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industrial farming practices in the US and many other countries could easily lead to similarly dangerous animal-to-human transmissions SARS-CoV-2 appears to have originated in bats, been passed to Malayan pangolins, and then made its jump to humans [1]. That is likely in a wet market. It is not likely on a single-animal industrial farm. [1] https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/research/current-bio...

Past black swan events are not necessarily good indicators for future black swan events. This time it was (probably) bats and pangolins--next time it could be chickens and pigs. I don't dispute that the wet markets are higher risk, but there is certainly some risk in industrial farming too.

> Past black swan events are not necessarily good indicators for future black swan events

SARS also originated from Chinese wet markets [1]. If you're trying to engineer a plague, crowding different species with one another's effluence is the traditional way to do it.

> there is certainly some risk in industrial farming too

Some. But not comparable to wet markets. The latter's only comparison is with medieval European cities, where people, sewage and livestock had constant and close proximity to one another.

The tragic thing is, the products of these wet markets are unaffordable for most Chinese. The entire world is put at risk because a narrow sliver of Beijing's elite want exotic wild game.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14738798

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