One of the the demographics that we are not seeing is the work categories of the people getting this (outside of healthcare/cops, etc.)
I bet they are people who work in cubicle farms or face to face service industries.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts office design going forward—I think more people will work from home; and that will allow for more space per person in office settings. I also think that face to face interaction is going to be a thing of the past in a lot of banks, movie theaters, etc.
Fine Dining is going to have to change as well. I doubt you will have three busboys running around the floors of those fancy NY establishments.
We’ll see.
I suspect, where it’s technologically possible, cubicle farms may be a thing of the past. Ability to be trusted to work from home will be a hiring requirement. Companies will see they don’t need to have the commercial real estate expenditure for huge offices if they can have some (or many) of their employees working from home. This will have downstream effects for everything from coffee vendors to service contracts for maintenance and anything related to ‘office buildings’.
I suspect once we start to see immunity gaining a foothold things will return to normal everywhere. Movie theaters are on their last legs in general. The specialty ones with sit down meals and wine and huge comfy chairs may make it. The chair farms with sticky floors and ten dollar popcorn, maybe not. Restaurants that survive this will likely return to normal.
I would LIKE to see changes in the tax laws that allow businesses to stash away cash and inventory withOUT being penalized by the tax codes. Federal, state and/or local. It makes no sense to hamstring businesses that could put away for a rainy day. In 1918 we didn’t have tax laws that punished ants and rewarded grasshoppers.
I would hope, however, that more Americans learn to cook at home. We were’t as obese a people when more of us ate at home.