A bad situation will get terribly worse.
IHS Markit forecasts the U.S. economy contracted at an annualized rate of 35.3 percent in the quarter just ended… its sharpest quarterly crash since 1947.
As the economy goes down, so, too, will businesses.
Roughly 60 percent of the 26,160 restaurants listed on Yelp’s review website that closed temporarily have now closed for good, the service reported.
The rate of permanent closures spiked 23 percent from May through June. About 44 percent of bars and clubs are permanently shuttered, Yelp noted. The shutdown ended indoor dining in about 90,000 restaurants nationwide.
For many of the eateries, government aid is ending or has been impossible to get; rent breaks from landlords and flexibility from creditors are wearing thin.
Honolulu, Las Vegas, and several cities in southern California had the highest rate of permanent closures.
Arizona has lost about 900 of its 10,000 restaurants; 2,200 of California’s 81,500 restaurants have shut down. By the end of June, about 17,000 restaurants in Michigan had permanently closed, the state’s hotel and restaurant association reported.
The resurgent COVID virus could force an additional 10 percent of independent food purveyors to shut down for good, reported Stephens, a financial services firm.
Some positive news: from late May through early July, searches on Yelp for black-owned restaurants soared more than 7,000 percent.
TRENDPOST: Politicians in the U.S. and around the world have destroyed businesses by not only locking them down and relocking them down for extended periods, but inventing capacity rules, mask wearing regulations, social distancing mandates, etc., that have destroyed their ability to operate profitably.
