{"id":16115,"date":"2020-10-12T04:46:17","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T10:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=16115"},"modified":"2020-10-12T04:46:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T10:46:17","slug":"covid-neither-neighborhood-nor-innovation-friendly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/covid-neither-neighborhood-nor-innovation-friendly\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid neither neighborhood nor innovation friendly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boak & Bailey\u2019s news and nuggets<\/a> Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? There are reasons to believe it hasn\u2019t.<\/em><\/p>\n

Story No. 1 from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend: \u201cMcDonald\u2019s, Chipotle and Domino\u2019s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles.\u201d The subhead: \u201cA health crisis is creating a divide in the restaurant world. Big, well-capitalized chains are thriving while small independents struggle to keep their kitchens open.\u201d <\/p>\n

Story No. 2: \u201cCovid Is Crushing Small Businesses. That\u2019s Bad News for American Innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n

(These stories are behind the Journal\u2019s paywall<\/a>. I tracked them down in print, which is one more thing that’s not as easy as it was at the beginning of the year.)<\/p>\n

Restaurants come and go. About 60,000 open in an average year, according to the National Restaurant Association, and 50,000 close. But this year it will be much worse. The association predicts 100,000 restaurants will close during 2020. Employment at restaurants and bars has dropped by 2.3 million jobs from a total of more than 12 million before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The chain-restaurants-versus-corner-diners dynamic does not compare exactly to well-capitalized-breweries-versus-corner-breweries one, but it seems like the view in January 2021 will be much different than the one in January 2000.<\/p>\n

The second story suggests that when economic power resides in fewer hands then innovation and entrepreneurship suffer. \u201cIn 1989 businesses with fewer than 100 employees accounted for 40% of the workers employed by all U.S. firms, according to the Census Bureau. Newly released data show that as of 2018 that had fallen to 33%,\u201d according to WSJ. \u201cNow it is almost certainly even lower. Small-business transaction data collected by software and business-services provider Womply show that about 1 in 5 businesses that were open in January have stopped transacting entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The numbers for small breweries<\/a> do not look as terrifying as they did initially, but as Tomme Arthur suggested on the Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast,<\/a> \u201cWe\u2019re still in an if-when function here and frankly, on a business level, we\u2019re not out of it yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, the scary part is I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve seen the level of closings that were forecast, and I still think there are a lot of closings that could come out of this\u2014and I feel like there are some pretty key players who aren\u2019t going to make it as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second story suggests that when economic power resides in fewer hands then innovation and entrepreneurship suffer. \u201cIn 1989 businesses with fewer than 100 employees accounted for 40% of the workers employed by all U.S. firms, according to the Census Bureau. Newly released data show that as of 2018 that had fallen to 33%,\u201d according to WSJ.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow it is almost certainly even lower. Small-business transaction data collected by software and business-services provider Womply show that about 1 in 5 businesses that were open in January have stopped transacting entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story implies that it might be January 2022, or later, before we understand the final impact. \u201cThe challenges that small businesses are now facing could cast a pall over the U.S. economy for years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boak & Bailey\u2019s news and nuggets Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[703,292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-links","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4bV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16115"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16120,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16115\/revisions\/16120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}