The End of Restaurants in COVID-19?
By: Shawn Harris
Tags: Restaurant, Unemployment, Masks, Behavioral Economics, Covid-19

The End of Restaurants in COVID-19?

photo: Shane Rounce/Unsplash

There are many permanent changes that will form as we continue on this same reactively prohibitive COVID-19 response path.

One particularly pervasive aspect is that we should not expect to have a restaurant industry in any capacity resembling pre-mandated individual restriction control-era norms. Yes — the $900+ billion dollar industry that’s 5% of the U.S. GDP and employs ~15% of the entire workforce — that one.

You are most likely not going to a restaurant with your family or friends to enjoy an evening out with a meal and good company when you all have to wear a mask in the restaurant — or maneuver it around your face in the new obstacle course of eating.

Breaking it down a bit, functionally: Are you all going to move your mask up and down every time you want to take a bite? Take a drink? How about just sitting at a table together talking?

What’s going to be the prohibited number of people at a table, four? Less? Just how damn big does that table now have to be so that each of you can maintain your mandated distance from each other? Do you all live in the same house? If not, individual distancing is required — you are in a public space.

Distancing tables could be introduced perhaps, and is already being planned. Current requirements for a table of four with multiple sets of similar tables emplaced within in the same restaurant space would be ~20 feet apart each, for that same number of people at each one table.

Start booking your table at McDonalds 6 months in advance for one of the four tables allowed to be occupied simultaneously in their space. Order a shared appetizer for the table? Illegal. Share a bite of your amazing steak with your date? Better not let anyone see you do it, you could be arrested or fined.

Perhaps even more randomized edicts will emerge from an obscure relevance authority stating that; “Masks do not have to be worn inside restaurants!”

Well, hallelujah!! Oh wait…what?!? Huh…OK, wait a minute…so, then what’s the point of the mandated mask in the first place? And the tsunami of Mask Shaming outrage? To protect others around you, right??

Protect Others Around You from those invisible micro-droplets spewing forth…you know, while doing human things like eating, drinking, talking, breathing, laughing, crying, and sighing all in close proximity with one another — like at a table in a restaurant.

So then, “no masks in restaurants” becomes the latest tool of redefined convenience under shifting decision-making protocols. Did social distancing requirements magically disappear too? Is there something magically unique about the inside of a 50’ X 50’ restaurant dining room that suspends the narrative of the world outside of this amazing eatery? Probably not — hard no.

Well, perhaps then “only restaurant staff have to wear masks and gloves”… “and we take the temperature of all guests before they enter”… “and one additional temperature check during the meal, and they only have to put on a mask every time they get up to use the bathroom, and…”

No. People will not be returning to restaurants if they have to medically fight their way in and throughout the meal.

The same follows for movie theaters, concerts, sporting events, potlucks, school cafeterias, Thanksgiving, church dinners, cookouts, and any other gathering venue where a key element is eating, drinking, communing, and sharing the close personal enjoyment of togetherness. Maybe there will even be decisional mandates to close up or lockdown entire industries, regions, organizations — or countries.

This is the flavor of ridiculousness notched along the road we’re currently moving down.

Better get permanently comfortable with drive-thru only, and looking at the inside of your kitchen — mostly alone.

This is how a great industry dies, and enables Wave After Wave After Wave After Wave of protracted lockdowns for years — and perhaps takes the entire Service Industry (at a minimum) down with it.

I hope I’m wrong.