BOSTON’S RESTAURANTS ON THE BRINK

As we have reported, Yelp estimates some 60 percent of restaurants that were forced by politicians to lock down will go out of business.
Of Boston’s 16,000 restaurants that were open on 1 March, about 3,600, or 23 percent, have not reopened since the state’s shutdown was eased, according to the Boston Globe.
There are many more permanent closures to come, many of the city’s restaurateurs say.
“There are a lot of really good restaurants that are not going to make it,” said Chris Coombs, the owner of four eateries in the Boston metro area who they quoted, “The wave [of closures] hasn’t even started yet. October through March is going to be so bad.”
Coombs is permanently closing his Boston Chops restaurant, where the combined monthly cost of rent and utilities exceeds $40,000. When it reopened after the shutdown, Coombs was serving an average of 130 meals a week; pre-pandemic, his slowest weeks would total about 1,300.
Jose Duarte received a loan through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, but “it was not enough,” he said.
When he reopened Taranta, the restaurant he started in 2000, the state’s social distancing mandate only let him have four tables, about 30 percent of capacity.
“On a Saturday night, we could fill all the tables and we would do 50 or 55” customers, he added. “We used to do 130 to 150.”
Taranta has now gone out of business.
Stories like Duarte’s, multiplied by thousands of similar ones across the city, will add to the jobless rolls.
In July, Massachusetts’ unemployment rate was 16.1 percent, the highest in the nation.
“Ten percent of jobs in Massachusetts sit inside the four walls of a restaurant,” said Robert Luz, President of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association. “That does not include everybody that provides us with goods and services.”
Luz’s group, along with the Independent Restaurant Coalition and Mass Restaurants United, are pressing for passage of the $120-billion “Restaurants Act,” now before Congress. In Massachusetts, a Distressed Restaurant Fund is part of an economic development bill now in the legislature.
Luz hopes no more than a third of Massachusetts’ restaurants will fail before the state recovers from the shutdown.
But “if we don’t figure out rapid testing or a highly effective vaccine,” chef Chris Coombs said, “every restaurant is at risk of failure.”
TREND FORECAST: As noted in our “ADULTS LIVING WITH PARENTS IN RECORD NUMBERS” article in this Trends Journal, many of those forced to move back home once worked in the hospitality, restaurant, entertainment, or tourism sectors that have been economically crippled by the lockdown tsunami launched by politicians.
Beyond the loss of revenue and jobs will be the billions in lost taxes that will increase city, state, and nations’ budget deficits, which, in turn, will mean more layoffs in the public sector. To make up for the losses, politicians will hit up the working class by raising taxes to pay for the misery and destruction they created.
As we continue to forecast, new anti-tax, anti-vax political movements will rise across the country and around the world to counter establishment parties.