A lot of the smaller operators are going broke. I've seen multiple stories of minority owners, in poorer parts of the city, who are losing everything they own. A lot of these people are retiree's that needed the income to live on.
The next big thing we are going to start hearing about is how people can't find apartments that will take them. I've been fortunate because the primary factor we look at when deciding to rent to someone or not is their credit score. The individual must have at least "good" credit. I found that people with good credit, or better, have something to lose if you take them to court so problems tend to get resolved.
It does not surprise me. In the LOOOONG view, they have been trying to get rid of the middle class ever since it arose. Every time a different way has been tried, it always results in a return to a class society with no means of upward mobility.... Feudal lords and serfs, by many other names.
I really do feel for you man. I am a pooter service tech, and I have it bad. Traffic is a 10th of what I had, and I have real money invested in inventory that I can't move, and no new money to speak of coming in the door... I have been side-hustling cash deals (flipping cars, smalls) just to make ends meet.
I am lucky to be broadly invested in repair (I am more a tinker than a tech). so I can go find work. This month I made maybe three hundred bucks over my bench, and all the rest has been buying broken lawn mowers and such, fixing them, and selling them... And one car that I bought cheap hung a fender on, and flipped for around fifteen hundred in profit.
And I saw this coming sorta - Not this exactly, but I thought hard about how unsustainable the system was becoming, paid out of everything and went back to my redneck roots. So I don't require much income. as low as my income is right now, I still replaced my investment money and put an extra grand in my seed pocket.
My position ain't much, but it is all the way paid for, and it is durable in hard times. The whole thing is out of pocket, and outside of taxes on my properties, I really can't get hurt.
But I know what it is like in business today. I know folks are financed hard and have to make big income just to keep the doors open and stay even. And I hate what is happening to them right now.