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> Competition under our current rules has eliminated the ability of most businesses to save cash or have any real buffer, since they'd lose to the ones that ran
by tathougies 7y ago
> Competition under our current rules has eliminated the ability of most businesses to save cash or have any real buffer, since they'd lose to the ones that ran month to month right on the edge. Pushing to "end the shutdown" to return things to normal there is a false hope.
There is a huge difference between having money to cover declining sales over the course of a year or a few and having enough to cover 0% of sales due to government mandate. I wouldn't expect any company to have the resources to be able to survive a complete zero'ing of revenue for any sustained amount of time.
- majormajor 7y agoMy argument is that restaurant demand was cratering before the government mandates and the businesses were already doomed at that point. Same thing with conferences and the event business. And air travel. Hotels. Etc... The people putting these policies in place are reacting to the disease, but the fault lies with the disease, not the people. So then we're balancing "the economy is quite fucked anyway, so might as well try to save as many lives as possible" against "some people are going to die anyway, might as well try to save as much of the economy as possible."
- tathougies 7y agoI don't think restaurant demand was cratering before coronavirus? Coronavirus will at some point not be so important, either because it will be eradicated (unlikely) or because we'll stop caring (more likely), and treat it like we treated polio in the 50s, which didn't cause economic disruptions the like of which we see today.
- majormajor 7y agoIt wasn't cratering before the coronavirus, it was cratering before the official response. Same with toilet paper hoarding. So claims that we can "stop the shutdown" and "reopen" are naive.