‘A DIFFERENT ECONOMY’
From restaurants to retailers, virus transformed economies
It would be just a temporary
NEW YORK » precaution.
When the viral pandemic erupted in March, employees of the small insurance firm Thimble fled their Manhattan offices. CEO Jay Bregman planned to call them back soon — as soon as New York was safe again.
Within weeks, he’d changed his mind. Bregman broke his company’s lease and told his two dozen or so staffers they could keep working from home — possibly for good.
The gains were at once unexpected and immediate. Bregman is saving money on rent. He no longer has to persuade recruits to relocate to a crushingly expensive city. He’s increased his staff by 20% and for the first time added new hires in Texas and California.
“I was very skeptical at first that we could conduct business this way for a long time,” Bregman said. But having employees work from home proved a “huge benefit” for ev
eryone.
Like no other event in memory, the pandemic has upended economies in the United States and across the world — transforming how people work, travel, eat, shop and congregate. It has changed how students are educated, how people communicate, how households are entertained and which industries, geographic areas and categories of people will thrive and which will suffer.
It has widened a gap between educated and affluent people who can work from home and the less fortunate — people in lower-income households without college educations or high skills who depend solely on wages rather than stock or home equity gains — who now stand to be left further behind. And it’s forced many working mothers to quit their jobs for lack of child care.
The economy shed a shocking 22 million jobs after the pandemic struck. Many employers have since recalled some of their furloughed workers. Yet the recovery has slowed. Not until the end of 2023 does Moody’s Analytics foresee the U. S. economy regaining its pre-pandemic employment level. In the most bruised sectors — hotels, for example, and retail — changing economic habits mean that employers may never need as many workers as they did before the pandemic.
Even after vaccines have conquered the virus, economies have restored their health and jobless people have found work again, the economic landscape will almost surely look different. Among the many life-altering consequences of the year 2020, the coronavirus reshaped how people and businesses engage economically.
At the very least, the crisis accelerated trends that were already well underway:
A shift away from physical stores toward e-commerce. The flexibility of working from home. The streaming of movies rather than theater-going. Frequent meal deliveries. Video-conferencing replacing much business travel.
“We’re not going back to the same economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a European Central Bank forum last month “We’re recovering, but to a different economy.”
Businesses are rewriting their business plans to keep up. Warner Bros Pictures announced this month that all its 2021 movies, including a new “Matrix” movie and “Godzilla vs. King Kong,” will stream on HBO Max at the same time that they appear in theaters — a seismic shift for Hollywood. Restaurants are testing delivery- only “ghost kitchens” to keep serving customers who remain wary of crowded dining rooms.
Even so, economists say it’s far from certain which of the myriad changes will prove permanent and which may fade as people who’ve been holed up at home for months return to their prepandemic routines.
Will white- collar workers yearn for their old cubicles and face-to-face contact with friends and colleagues? Will foodies return to fashionable restaurants, young people to the hottest bars? Will audiences once again gather, elbow to elbow, for symphonies, Hollywood blockbusters and Broadway musicals? If attendance doesn’t return to normal, can those indus
tries survive?
For the economy’s vast retail sector, the urgent question is: Will customers want to shop in physical stores in numbers anywhere near what they used to be?
Retailers like Lisa Shah are holding out hope. Shah has been hurt by a plunge in tourism in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where her three LIT Boutique stores are located. Before the pandemic, her women’s clothing stores combined would see about 600 customers each weekend. Government- mandated restrictions and the anxiety of customers have slashed that figure essentially in half.
Shah has since built up her online store, changed the brands she offers and dangled discounts. She keeps asking herself what else she can do.
“I don’t know where else to pivot,” she said. “We’ve pivoted so much.”
Optimistically, some experts detect a collective hunger to return to the old ways, at least for people with the means to do so — to the familiar and comfortable routines of gathering at bars, dining in restaurants, strolling in stores, flying off on vacation.
“I don’t think you should overestimate how much will be permanently changed” by the pandemic, said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “The idea that COVID will be a fork in the road for a lot of things — I am personally skeptical.”
People, Kirkegaard said, “want to go to restaurants. They want their life back, not a new life they haven’t tried before.”