Commentary
Visiting with a restaurant owner last night, he told me that they fared pretty well throughout the pandemic period. They had a large restaurant so the capacity restrictions didn’t hurt their business. They have a known brand and had already set up the takeout and delivery apparatus. They had high ranks in every rating service, so the place became a go-to for people. And they profited.
The same cannot be said about smaller and newer restaurants. Countless numbers of them died in this period. We still don’t have a firm number but some estimates are nearly 100,000.
This was the opposite of market competition. It was a planned destruction of the sort we never thought we would see in the United States….