Get ready for one bleak winter

A winter of discontent looms.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, it won’t be made glorious by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.

At a time which calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men — who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes — are in contentious dispute for the presidency.

Whoever wins, President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53% of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.

Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.

Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff ) find work most easily.

Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.

They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.

The individually owned restaurant epitomizes en