Laboring under a gaggle of new state and local restrictions, restaurant owners from burger joints to five-star favorites are warning that the new strictures could send thousands more eateries into oblivion and add to the 2.1 million jobs the industry already has lost.
California, Illinois, and Washington have again ended indoor dining. Maryland and Wyoming have banned buffets. In Maine, dining establishments must close by 9 PM; in Vermont, they can seat only one household per table. Many states ban alcohol sales after 10 or 11 PM.
Los Angeles has forbidden indoor and outdoor dining, leaving restaurants with only take-out and delivery customers.
In Nova Scotia, restaurants and bars now are required to gather contact information for each patron and record the date and time of the visit in case contract tracing is needed.
The National Restaurant Association (NRA) is calling for the patchwork of restrictions to be eased and for Congress to bail out restaurateurs.
“We are too commonly labeled ‘superspreaders’ and have become a convenient scapegoat for reflexive shutdowns,” the NRA wrote in a November letter to the National Governors Association.
The association has “not found any systemic outbreaks of COVID-19 from the hundreds of thousands of restaurants around the country that operate within the Association’s guidance,” the letter said.
“Tens of thousands of additional restaurant bankruptcies – and millions of lost jobs – are now more likely, while the science remains inconclusive on whether health benefits will accrue,” the NRA’S letter warned.
About 17 percent of U.S. restaurants already have gone out of business, according to a November report by the Independent Restaurant Coalition, and a third could be gone by January.
Restaurants employed about 11.1 million Americans before the pandemic and account for 20 percent of the jobs lost to the shutdown, the coalition noted.
Last April, as shutdowns cratered the U.S. economy, eight million restaurant workers across the country lost their jobs, an NRA study found.
Six million have returned to work, the association said in a 20 November statement, but millions could again be sent home if the current spike in virus cases leads to another round of mandated business shutdowns.
The association has sent a letter to U.S. governors and mayors warning of any new shutdowns’ devastating effects on restaurant workers, especially as various federal and state support programs are ending.
It could take years for business lunches and tourist trade to return to pre-pandemic levels, David Chang, founder of Momofuku and other renowned eateries, has said in several public statements.
The RESTAURANTS Act – short for the “Real Economic Support That Acknowledges Unique Restaurant Assistance Needed To Survive” Act – would provide $120 billion in grants to the industry. It has passed the U.S. House and gained support from 50 senators but Senate leader Mitch McConnell has refused to put it to a vote.
Meanwhile, news of COVID vaccines’ effectiveness means “real hope is on the horizon,” chef Danny Meyer, who owns New York’s Union Square Café and other dining spots, told the Financial Times.
TRENDPOST: In a recent Los Angeles board of supervisors’ meeting, officials of the county’s health department admitted they had no hard evidence proving that shutting down outdoor dining would reduce the COVID virus’s spread.
Yet, this fact is continually ignored as politicians across the globe instead institute more draconian restaurant lockdown rules… which, if not followed, will cost operators their licenses.
Yet, the lockdowns continue unabated targeting restaurants and bars that are mostly small businesses operations, millions of which will not re-open.
