NYC restaurants are dying thanks to COVID insanityBy NY Post Editorial Board
March 14, 2022
City restaurants opened Monday to all diners, vaxxed or no, for the first time since August. Let’s all hope the industry can recover rapidly from the devastation wrought by COVID craziness.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that you still can’t get a table at Masa. Outside the glitziest spots, the picture for eateries is ugly.
Table reservations were down 53.2% citywide since 2020. In January, that number hit a crushing 72%. But the real bad news can be found in new data from the state comptroller’s office, which shows that from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021 employment in New York City’s restaurant sector plummeted 25.4% — about 78,000 jobs lost.
That represents a huge number of closed eateries, and many of those that survived are burdened by huge debt.
That 25.4% collapse compares to a 6.3% decline across all city private-sector employment — and a national restaurant-job drop of just 1.6%. That’s right: NYC restaurants got hit 15 times as hard as the US average.
Behind those losses are “stop the spread” policies imposed amid the pandemic: shutdowns, reduced-capacity dining, vaccine and mask mandates for workers and customers.
In other words, the numbers are yet one more measure of the damage from the de Blasio-Cuomo “public health” mandates. Harms concentrated on our most economically vulnerable: The average yearly salary for a restaurant worker at the end of 2020 NYC was a bit more than $32,400 (and it went down, while overall salaries went up). And the sector’s workers are markedly more likely to be immigrants, as well as Hispanic or Asian.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/03/14/nyc-restaurants-are-dying-thanks-to-covid-insanity/
