[kneebonian]

Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever. At the same time massive mega-corps were able to be deemed essential, and allowed to continue to operate, turning record profits.

But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.

[vkou]

> Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever.

This meme needs to die already.

A lot of those businesses shut down in 2020.

It's 2023 now, we haven't had any COVID restrictions for 2 years, and all the ones that have gone away... Have long since been replaced with equivalents. Some of whom have also shut down, and have been replaced with equivalents.

Restaurants and coffee shops die and open all the time. 2020 was rough, but in the long term, the net impact on my neighborhood has been ~zero.

You know where they have been dying and not re-opening? Downtown, because half their former patrons are now WFH and don't go into the office anymore. Unfortunately, that's a little harder to blame on COVID shutdowns.

[Retric]

Many cities never closed those during the pandemic. So it was really a local decision.

[irrational]

Not everything closed during the past few years because of restrictions. There was a chocolate shop that we loved going to for date night. All the locations closed during the pandemic AFTER they had been reopened for months because the parent company was bought out by a venture capital firm who only wanted the chocolate production part of the business (for selling to high end grocery stores) and didn’t want the retail stores.