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Small business owners whose lives have been permanently upended are going to be a whole new political faction around the world. Doctors and nurses are at least getting tagged heroes and will likely still have jobs even if hospitals end up bankrupt. But this group will be...angry.
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Wuhan's 11 million people are free to dine out. But they aren't trib.al/YFE4ZfQ
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Restaurateur Spring like Arab Spring. Many will go from moderately wealthy to bankrupt and working min-wage jobs in warehouses or as uber drivers, waiting for robots to take those jobs. The restaurant belt today is like the rust belt in the 80s. A political time bomb being primed
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There’s not going to be enough money printer go brr money. Many will turn to loan sharks and scammers in a desperate attempt to salvage their life and buy time to last through the recovery. In the process they’ll dig themselves into a bigger hole that will eventually claim them.
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Every life saved now is going to cost a few lives ruined. The human cost of this effort is going to be *very* unevenly distributed. Basically restaurateurs (and the class of businesses they represent) are destroying themselves to save lives, mostly disadvantaged ones.
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The part of this take where the owners are somehow hurt worse than the more disadvantaged employees is...bad. Also aren’t small restaurants in this country probably disproportionately minority- and family-owned businesses?
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The employees are mobile labor in a way the owners generally aren’t.i think they’re actually going to be in better shape overall. They’ll lose months of income not years of capital building, Sometimes having more to lose means you lose more.
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Owners much more likely to have enough capital to sustain themselves above desperation. Yeah they may lose more in raw $ but employees much more likely to be pushed past huge thresholds like homelessness, food insecurity, etc even by small spikes in cost/income disruption.