Imagine that you are the owner of a moderately successful restaurant. You poured all of your life savings into it. It’s really hard work, with a small profit margin, but it was your dream, and it means the world to you. It’s not just a job; your customers and your workers are practically your family.
Then the virus came, and you had to shut down. You applied for and received a loan from the feds to pay your rent and keep your workers on the payroll during the lockdown. It is becoming increasingly likely, however, that nothing like normal operations will be possible for months, and maybe even years, to come. The current government money is going to dry up, and you can’t survive with your previous operational model on 25 or even 50 percent capacity.
What do you do? Can you effectively keep the business in a sort of comatose state indefinitely until the vaccine arrives? Alternatively, can you change your business model so that you can actually make money at a lower capacity? What would that mean for your workers? Finally, is it realistic to expect the government to help you out in the long run?
The answers to the first four questions will, to a large extent, dictate the direction of the economy, and the outcome of the election. I will address the last one in my next post.