[ALee]

I wonder how much of this labor is a choice between online labor versus choosing not to work retail where the profit is a lot lower, meaning your take-home is equal to your costs.

Let's assume that you can make a reasonable living in a different part of town instead of commuting to a service sector job. Add on top of that, you get to control your hours and there also seems to be more and more foot traffic in that part of town. As you start moving to that part of town, you realize that it's so much closer to your work that you save money on transportation and you have free time to pursue investing or other ways to better yourself. I don't think we would ever have issues with labor moving to better parts of town, right?

The only issue is that this better part of town is the internet. I wonder if the larger long-standing effects of COVID were an experiment on the general population that they could make money outside of what they've been told.