Will all the small business be replaced by chains and franchises?

[ineverpost]

Poor people will be relegated more and more to large chains. Small business will remain but be drastically reduced. It will become more high end oriented as they will need customers to pay their high overhead.

 

[Papi Chulo]

Say goodbye to all small restaurants in San Francisco. Indefinite lockdown.

https://sf.eater.com/2020/12/31/222...ockdown-quarantine-shutdown-outdoor-dining-sf

San Francisco’s Lockdown and Quarantine Has Been Extended ‘Indefinitely’
Outdoor dining will be shut down well into 2021

by Eve Batey Dec 31, 2020, 11:21am PST

An indefinite extension of San Francisco’s stay-at-home and quarantine orders means dining districts like Fisherman’s Wharf will remain quiet well into 2021

San Francisco’s stay-at-home order, which was tentatively expected to lift as of January 7 2021, has been extended “indefinitely,” Mayor London Breed and Director of Health Dr. Grant Colfax announced Thursday. In addition, officials say, the city might keep its stay-at-home in place even after the state lifts it, depending on “key health indicators.” That means that activities including outdoor dining will remain forbidden in San Francsico for an unforeseen length of time.

The announcement was a surprise to those who attended Colfax’s final address of the year, which was delivered on December 29. While he warned that New Year’s Eve gatherings could be “catastrophic” for the area’s COVID-19 case rate, he also said that the increase in positive coronavirus tests was leveling off. He did not, we should note, make any indication that the city expected its current lockdown — which the region entered voluntarily on December 6, and was made official by the state on December 16 — would continue past next week.

In a press release sent by San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management on December 31, the officials wrote that “due to ongoing regional ICU capacity limitations and continuing increase of cases, San Francisco does not expect the Bay Area will meet the State’s thresholds for lifting the order” by January 7. That’s probably a reasonable expectation: The state requires the full Bay Area region, which includes Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, Monterey, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano, and San Francisco counties, as well as the city of Berkeley, to demonstrate that 15 percent of its intensive care unit hospital beds are free. At present, while San Francsico has around 32 percent availability, the region at a whole is at 7.5 percent.

The stay-at-home extension announcement was a disappointment to Laurie Thomas, the executive director of local dining lobby the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. “This is not the news we had hoped to hear,” she said Thursday morning, even then acknowledging that “given the 7.5 percent regional ICU capacity number posted yesterday,” she knew then that the Bay Area was “unlikely to be released from that order on January 8th.”

That said, Thomas says that she’s glad the announcement was made now, as opposed to next week, when many assumed the order would be lifted. “We appreciate the city’s effort to provide businesses with more advance notice for planning purposes,” Thomas says, and “we appreciate the recently passed federal COVID relief bill,” but “we continue to stress that we need more financial relief from the city of San Francisco, the state of California and the federal government.”

In addition, officials say, a public health order implemented on December 17 that requires “anyone traveling, moving, or returning to San Francisco from anywhere outside the Bay Area” to quarantine for 10 days has been extended past the initial end date of January 4. It’s a decision that “responds to the significant prevalence of the coronavirus throughout the State and Country,” officials say, and is intended to protect “against the spread of a new variant of the virus detected recently in the United Kingdom, Colorado, and California.”

Even after the region’s ICU bed numbers allow the stay-at-home order to be lifted, the city might still be shut down, Breed and Colfax say. “Once the State lifts its Regional Stay at Home order,” only then will SF “reassess the key health indicators to determine if they support relaxing the current restrictions on businesses and activities, and resuming the measured re-opening process,” they say. In other words, even after the state says that activities like outdoor dining can resume, San Francisco might continue to restrict restaurants to takeout and delivery.

One reason San Francisco might keep the stay-at-home in place is that, so far, it seems to be working. “Though cases continue to climb, they are increasing at a slower rate than when the orders were implemented,” the city said via statement. “As a result of our collective actions, more than 400 deaths may have prevented.”

“We have been proactive in putting the stay at home order and travel quarantine in place to protect San Franciscans and in the hopes that by acting quickly, we could flatten the curve and re-open faster,” Breed says. “This seems to be working but we need more time to determine that we are moving in the right direction and that the December holidays don’t set us back. There are glimmers of hope and now is not the time to let up.”

Yep, small business restaurants are done in San Fransicko

 

[ShinkanPo]

They will be replaced by Gulags

 

[genecop]

 

[Blake_UK]

We don't need businesses. We need safety! The safety of the world is in staying indoors! All we need is online ordering. I prefer that all of our communication is through proprietary channels owned by the same interlocking companies that make more money out of our isolation!

This is how we stay safe in the long run!

The sad thing is that it's difficult to tell if this is parody or not.

A sizeable proportion of the public actually think that way.

 

[mudrubble]

The sad thing is that it's difficult to tell if this is parody or not.

A sizeable proportion of the public actually think that way.

It's a crazy world, brother. I'd say an increasingly large proportion of the public cannot think critically at all. It's a skill that has been being weaned out of most of us for generations and at this point we can't tell a woman from a man, a trans from a black activist, an inequality from a crime, a pandemic from a report of one, etc..

If the future depends on our thinking it's over. Enjoy your loved ones and your own personal growth. The world is utterly fucked out there right now.

I think reading some Thomas Sowell can help, lol. Anything that involves giving gov'ts more power (including the power to help corporations achieve monopolies) is usually not in our best interest as a people. As a black man I never suspected how right the founding fathers of the US had it in terms of not trusting your gov'ts or, indeed, any accumulation of power in any one place.

This is a crazy world and the lengths those in the know will go to are simply not going to be suspected by the common man. The gov't is the best tool to use, after media (including social media), to control the thinking of the world and it's in full effect today.

 

[panamaican]

They were going to get replaced anyway. Franchises were eating small biz for a while because of the proven business model. That said there will always be some out there. People are entrepreneurial, they will always take a shot.

You don't need a bank loan to open a small business. People have always been able to start restaurants and bars and such on a budget. I don't expect that to stop.

Chains aren't going to just snap up locations because those businesses still need to be sure that they can get enough customers into the shop to make it profitable.