The COVID-19 pandemic did a number on a bunch of industries, but did it unfairly target the restaurant industry?
On average, about one in three restaurants fail within their first year of opening. The industry is super competitive with quite low barriers to entry making it easy for people to open a restaurant but extremely difficult to keep it open. That statistic comes from the reality that most people opening restaurants don't have too much industry knowledge--maybe a talent for cooking and s couple good recipes, but not too much experience beyond that. The industry is also full of fierce competition and dependent on a lot of different moving parts--from employees to food delivery to you name it.
COVID-19 hurt restaurants--arguably more so than other industries. A restaurant cannot "work from home", when the pandemic hit restaurants were one of the first things to close. They were only allowed to do take-out for months. While that seems like a viable option, places like DoorDash and Post-mates took a hefty 15% commission on all orders used through their app. Not only were sales plummeting, restaurants were forced to lose out on even more profits due to delivery service being a new necessity. Outdoor seating followed this making it so that restaurants with limited outdoor space could have three or four tables open and running with guidelines that didn't make any sense at all--rules like spaced 6 feet apart but if they are not exactly facing the same way it can be 4ft apart . And after everything started to open up again, restaurants continued to be the first operation to close with a spike in cases. December of 2020, restaurants closed yet again--those who had survived the first go-around were threatened again.
In 2020, 110,000 restaurants failed and the industry as a whole lost around $240 billion in sales. Restaurants and hospitality were hit by far the hardest by COVID-19, but for what? Indoor dining is the same transmission rate as going shopping in a store inside, it is the same as going to a grocery store inside, or an office inside, it is the same as going on a plane and taking off a mask to eat while on the flight. All this is true, yet restaurants were still the first places to close down--one of the most volatile industries to be a part of closed down first. There were lots of mistakes made during the pandemic, but the restaurant industry caught it the hardest. There could have been different guidelines in place where people had to wear masks until food came then they could eat, or the government could have helped pay for plexiglass partitions. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people's livelihood was ruined and are still left to pick up the pieces.
Having worked as a server in a restaurant during the pandemic and having witnessed several of my favorite local restaurants go out of business because of it, I must agree wholeheartedly. Despite my community and family's best efforts to keep our favorite places in business the odds were seemingly stacked against them. The fact that the overall quarantine management was so "off and on" destroyed any ability for them to predict sales and plan accordingly and it's a damn shame.
Restaurants definitely were impacted by the pandemic; I think about that all the time as I drive through LA. Additionally, restaurants who didn't have outside dining options suffered greater than businesses who did, and I think what's interesting to note is that restaurants that don't have outside space are often the mom and pop, small restaurants that were struggling anyways. I think this pandemic was especially devastating for small restaurant owners in suburban/ neighborhoods where most people don't eat out a ton.
I have family friends that own a super popular restaurant in NYC and luckily they stayed open but they were hit hard. Many employees got laid off and they had to find other ways to save. They kind of broke the rules and tried to sneak locals in to eat, but still, it wasn't enough. Even thinking about the after-effects of the pandemic they are still struggling. Now that things are opening up, they had to find new employees to hire because business is booming. Many people are living off of government money and relief, and do not want to work. So he struggled to find employees that were trustworthy and like the old ones.