SMALL FOOD PLACES CLOSE AS COVID GROWNS

Do you remember the last time you went to a restaurant before COVID-19? Have any of them closed because of the pandemic? Do you know why they closed down?

The first topic of discussion is obviously the pandemic and how it mostly started this huge set of dominoes. During March of 2020 we were hit with sudden news of a virus growing in the US known as COVID-19. This was a huge shock to the people and the business industry with march madness just starting. With every restaurant stocked up for the waves of people entering in, they realized that this was going to hit hard on them.

This led to smaller and locally owned restaurants to their end due to becoming bankrupt or just too low of income. According to the article ‘Profit Doesn’t Exist Anymore’ in TIME Magazine Restaurants That Barely Survived COVID-19 Closures Now Face Labor, Inflation and Supply Chain Crises “If you can make that happen, you have a good shot of getting a 3% to 5% profit margin.”

After the storm settled with the pandemic starting, there were new alternatives to getting your favorite food with apps like Uber Eats and Grubhub. This made the consumer’s side a lot more accessible, but made the job a little more hard for the cooks as endless amounts of people came to pick up their orders. This also made it hard for people delivering food to the customers as one job led to the next.

Though all seems lost let’s not dwell on the bad of this because this helped people who are antisocial or were short on money get jobs as delivery people. With society figuring out how to adapt to the intense changes if the outbreak everything was seeming to be okay, but as the quote states “when one door closes, another opens.”

With the pandemic separating people from each other, this led to them posting to social media like the famous app TikTok. This made the platform from a “Cringe dancing app” to a more open app with people showing their talents and voicing their opinions on many topics. This led to workers in the restaurant to start talking about the many things that aren’t too well known in the business. These subjects included but not limited to: injuries, abuse, sexual assault, blackmail, long hours, bad pay, and just stress about the pandemic still going on.

“Normally yes other than bossy or rude customers then it’s fine if you make friends then it makes it 100 times easier to work,” Sophomore Lady Jaylen Russell said. This shows that workers may need just someone to be with as they take these blows and have someone to keep them going.  Though not many people aren’t looking into these situations, this is something that could affect the bigger industries in the long run.

Though these seem pretty small to big names like Burger King and Wendy’s, these can make people revolt against the bigger chains and possibly erase these titans of the business industry. Many have either started to leave their positions and go to different jobs as others went and have started their own small businesses that are becoming successful due to more people on social media. We may be living in an era where the bigger names of companies will fall as new names emerge from the rubble. This may seem extreme to think of, but this is a huge possibility that can be just beyond the horizon.

This has been a deep dive into the reasons why not only restaurants are closing but why also new ones are opening up. While the pandemic starts to calm down and everything becomes more available there doesn’t seem too much to worry about as we all try our best to stay safe and healthy.

“It feels similar to before, usually I eat outside now at restaurants instead of inside now because of COVID,” Sophomore Jordan Billy said. This shows how we’ve improved from the beginning of the pandemic and how we’re getting closer to normalcy.