Misty S.
I’ve recently relocated to Austin, Texas; this is my third move since COVID-19 began, beginning from the top of the country and settling at the bottom. I’ve gone from -60F winters to nearly perpetual summers and from snow mold to cedar fever. One thing each city has had in common is a desperate need for hourly employees. Help Wanted signs wallpaper storefronts and flyers and signage offering sign-on bonuses and higher-than-normal pay are in all types of businesses. Because of my side hustle type job, I spend hours nightly watching one industry that has been suffering terribly since the onset of COVID-19: the restaurant industry. While the industry has rebounded modestly, because of the COVID-19 unemployment benefits restaurants have changed seemingly irreversibly.
Austin is a huge city with thousands of enclaves each with their own aesthetic, personality and individualized woes. What might be written in stone at one restaurant doesn’t exist at another. A trendy snow-cone stand near my home forces patrons of all ages to wear masks in their outdoor lines or they refuse service. A block away a fancy sandwich shop requires staff to wear masks but not customers. A fancy steakhouse downtown or a popular suburban wing bar might only have a few customers wearing masks but mostly it’s packed with unmasked people. Some restaurants social distance with great fervor while others are packed so they’re barely navigable. But the one thing in common with nearly every restaurant I’ve encountered, on a daily basis, is understaffing.
The fast food restaurants are almost exclusively drive-thru oriented. I picked up food at a Taco Bell during peak dinner hours one Saturday and saw two twenty-somethings using a computerized terminal to order their food while a small swarm of employees milled about behind the counter preparing bags of food, then sealing each; otherwise the restaurant was empty. The McDonald’s on my route is closed all hours but the drive-thru line is almost always busy. Arby’s, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s Chicken, KFC, are almost always shut down. At first employees explained that it was because of COVID but now they say it saves the companies money to only use drive-thrus. This, of course, begs the question of whether these jobs will be available when the unemployment money runs out.
Just in time for the sad collusion of flu season, a [more dangerous, more lethal, more contagious, etc…] variant of COVID-19 and COVID relief drying up, autumn will arrive. What lies ahead economically for the country and for everyday middle-class Americans feels a bit grim. What’s more interesting and worthy of paying attention to is that America is far more open than most Western countries. New Zealand, UK, Australia and many other countries are still practicing Draconian measures to try to keep their respective infection numbers down and even California is reinstating a mask mandate even for vaccinated individuals here in America. At the same time, there are mass protests globally calling for reopening society and freedom of choice regarding shots and medical decisions.
No one can predict where we’re headed economically or otherwise but one thing is certain: the further down the road we go with lockdowns and closures and other sweeping societal changes built around COVID, the more difficult it will be to find our way back.
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Stay informed and take the hint