Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ability of my local Chinese place to serve customers is undiminished, my desire to eat Chinese food is undiminished, and all that's in the way is an ultimately temporary law. Agreed on this. But the rent paid out during the period of reduced revenue coming in creates a delta that this loan is filling in. The loan still needs to be paid back (even assuming 0% interest). That extra money needs to come from somewh…
A better way would be to suspend all debt collection and rent collection for x months. That will keep lots of small businesses alive, and employees on reduced salaries will still be able to feed their families if they don't have to worry about rent. Throw in food stamps for the unemployed and you're most of the way to keeping a nation going.
I know this would help for people I personally know in this industry.
Dine in has been reduced almost entirely but takeaway orders hasn't deviated too much from the standard.
The reality here is that a lot of small hospitality businesses don't actually make much profit at all so it's unlikely that they'd survive too long with this forced reduced business. And it's always unhelpful to hear (in general not from you) comments like "maybe they should have saved up more earlier" or "they shouldn't be opening up a restaurant then" because a lot of times they can't work in any other industry - this is all they know.
Imagine having reduced business through no fault of your own yet you're still liable for paying the commercial rent of $1.2k per week. You can't sell the business because no one is buying. You can't sell it because you lose all the goodwill which is bad especially if you've spent any money renovating the place up to standard.