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Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

But will your friends get haircuts, manicures, massages, etc every day when the quarantine lifts? Pent up demand only helps certain industries, unfortunately. Imagine being a hair dresser with a stack of bills from the shutdown and no big boost to income after the quarantine lifts to help pay things off.

Rough times ahead for many, sadly.

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It'll be interesting to see if habits change. It takes 30 days to change a habit. Will people just get used to not eating out. Personally I am enjoying this lack of unnecessarily bullshit spending that is imposed by the quarantine.

I think the change in habit will have catastrophic impacts in the short term. Landlords seem totally willing to let prime restaurant real estate sit open. In my neighborhood several storefronts have sat vacant for years waiting for a tenant that can survive more than a few months. Rents continually increase. This drives up food prices and landlords have become accustomed to those rates. Post-virus the new demand will not support those prices.

I am enjoying spending less money to eat but restaurants will not be able to reduce price to meet the lesser demand because their rents will not go down any time soon. The current restaurants will have to fail and that property will have to sit for potentially years before rent is reduced.

We need a penalty (additional property tax?) on vacant real estate to drive prices back down with shifting demand.

Yes a vacancy tax would help in that scenario. But why would landlords leave the place empty rather than taking some rent. Are a lot of them without debt and own the buildings outright?

There is a coffee shop down the street that couldn’t pay their rent a couple years ago, way before coronavirus. They started a gofundme to bail themselves out and promoted it on the hyperlocal blog. The nouveau riche giddily bailed them out. Landlords here seem to know, consciously or not, someone with money to burn will pay the price.

I’m personally aware of several small businesses that are simply burning capital from family or friends to stay alive. Almost all of it goes to rent.

For us, this was the catalyst that really got us to stick to "no eating out, no takeout, and eat leftovers". We've been trying to do this for months with spotty success. But this has forced our hand.

I've really noticed it in our trash and recycling bins. They've been half full on garbage day since the quarantine. Usually we have more than we can put in them. I'm hoping this behavior sticks for us, but I kind of doubt it.

Also try composting if you can, it has reduced waste going into the bin by about 50%, and that compost can be used to grow more food in a few months time. Most of that compost is the parts of fruit/veg not eaten, such s carrot peel or broccoli stalks.

We have chickens. They eat everything we don’t. And they give us eggs in exchange.

> Imagine being a hair dresser with a stack of bills from the shutdown

Presumably all of those bill are owed to other businesses, who are run by people. People with empathy. People who realize that keep a good customer is better than losing them, even if it means cutting them a break.

I think people will surprise others with how this pain will spread through the entire supply chain so it does't kill any one business. I think all the businesses in the supply chain know that killing everyone at the end of the chain isn't a good idea.

This is a fundamental question we are being and will be forced to answer more directly:

Are we willing to trust our collective empathy or do we need the social contract to fill in the gaps for collective protection from this harm?

I believe many will benefit from empathy, but it will be disproportionate and many communities who will need it the most will not receive it.

Bills are owed to: employees, banks (loans), and landlords. Employees need to eat, banks have no empathy, and most landlords don't either.

The current business model in many companies is to run it with the money from the bank and minimal stocks ("just in time"), so there is no buffer and the impact is going through the entire chain until either kills everyone or hits someone with some buffers. If that's the banks and the government is trying to put some buffers there, it's a good enough plan, if not then it looks like doom for many companies.

But those people also have bills to pay and so on down the line. Without some kind of debt jubilee, we’re going to be paying the consequences of this one way or the other.

Yes. The moment this quarantine lifts, I'm going to go to a proper barber, get a great haircut, and likely pay for extra things like shampoo and shaves which I don't normally. I'm so sick of having to do everything at home, including my haircuts, that I really just want to spend my money.

Not everyone will afford to do that and you will definitely not make up for weeks of loss of business for that barber shop.

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