Non-gigantic grocery stores are going to start closing because contrary to the official positions logistics is broken. Smaller grocery stores have very small margins and operate on COD basis. A friend of mine owns one. His distributors raised prices between 10-50% across the board and removed all the incentives. He does not have enough money to stock up at the new price points so he is slowing the buys, cleaning out inventory and is going to close unless the social distancing goes away by the end of the month. Anecdotally, other small supermarket operators are thinking about doing the same.
Effective grocery store prices are 2x - all of the sales have been removed. Eggs in Queens went from $1.69/dozen to $7.99 a dozen.
$1200 tax credit for 2020 ( this is what it actually is ) is nothing for people who live and support high cost areas which are the people who allow for the white collar jobs to exist.
Are those logistics broken because the government shut the logistics operators down, or because people running them have fallen ill, or are afraid of falling ill?
Every state with shutdown orders considers logistics essential services. Nobody but the virus is preventing the people working in them from going to work.
I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
If prices are rising, it has nothing to do with the shutdown, and everything to do with the fact that there's a global pandemic... Which will be made worse if lift the shutdown orders.
Are you planning on ordering these people back to work at gunpoint, to lower the price of eggs? Or are you going to instead, consider extending a short-term loan, so that the grocer can absorb the price hike? The number of hens laying eggs hasn't changed over the past four weeks.
> I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
That is not the message that is being repeated on TV and on the news. The message is "stay home. if you are close to people you are going to be infected and die. stay home". The message is not "Stay home unless you work in list in blah blah blah. Also, unless you have comorbidity such as diabetes, heart disease, compromised lunges you are going to be fine". If you keep repeating that people are going to die, people are going to believe you even though the number of people who are going to die that do not have comorbidity factors have a very low risk. That's how you destroy logistic.
Right now Amazon, objectively a logistics company, has an equivalent of the ground hold on all non-essentials. I cannot get a frying pan delivered until April 24th.
> I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
We are at 10% of seasonal flu death numbers heading head first into a wall.
This is a very weird line of argumentation. Do you think there is some media-wide conspiracy in favor of containment? To what end?
These "talking points" are also what the epidemiologists and politicians are saying. Just because you are in the minority that doesn't agree with it doesn't make you right and everyone else wrong.
> Right now Amazon, objectively a logistics company, has an equivalent of the ground hold on all non-essentials. I cannot get a frying pan delivered until April 24th.
Amazon is having a hold because demand for everything is up, because people are trying to avoid going outside to shop... And because their employees are concerned about their personal safety. No government agency has stepped in to shut down an Amazon warehouse. If you lift the shutdowns, you will actually increase their concerns about personal safety.
> If you keep repeating that people are going to die, people are going to believe you even though the number of people who are going to die that do not have comorbidity factors have a very low risk.
Those people have relatives who are at risk, or may not be interested in rolling the dice on ending up in the hospital. This virus has a much higher hospitalization rate than the flu. Are you ready to pay for all their medical bills? Has socialized medicine finally found its moment to arrive on the shores of the United States? Or, alternatively, are you personally ready to take a job lifting boxes in a warehouse for $15/hour with no medical benefits? One that you commute to in a subway car that's packed shoulder-to-shoulder with sick people?
The MTA is unable to operate the NYC subway, because they have so many sick employees. Do you think a Krelminesque order to stop broadcasting bad news on the telly is going to defy reality, and get the subway running at full capacity, again?
> We are at 10% of seasonal flu death numbers heading head first into a wall.
Italy has, over the span of 4 weeks, hit 300% of their regular seasonal flu deaths, and 50% of the hospitalizations, despite a lockdown but this apparently does not stop people on the internet from drawing false equivalences to the flu.
Do you have a better plan for dealing with a virus that sends more people to the hospital in 4 weeks, than the flu does in half a year? How many hospitalizations and deaths do you think they would have hit if cases continued to double every three days?
> Amazon is having a hold because demand for everything is up, because people are trying to avoid going outside to shop... And because their employees are concerned about their personal safety.
You cannot have it both ways - either employees are concerned for their safety and logistics therefore is affected or they are not and logistics is not affected.
> The MTA is unable to operate the NYC subway, because they have so many sick employees. Do you think a Krelminesque order to stop broadcasting bad news on the telly is going to defy reality, and get the subway running at full capacity, again?
MTA decided to cut the service on NYC subway because it projected a drop of demand. It is an organization has been been mismanaged for decades. I find it very difficult to believe that it would suddenly be making marginally optimal decisions in "the stay at home" environment.
> Italy has, over the span of 4 weeks, hit 300% of their regular seasonal flu deaths, and 50% of the hospitalizations, despite a lockdown but this apparently does not stop people on the internet from drawing false equivalences to the flu.
The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths come from comorbidity.
> Do you have a better plan for dealing with a virus that sends more people to the hospital in 4 weeks, than the flu does in half a year? How many hospitalizations and deaths do you think they would have hit if cases continued to double every three days?
Order a stay at home for at risk population and population with comorbidity. Lift it from anyone else. Eat 10-15% hit to the economy rather than a total devastation. The mass poverty creating economic hit is going to destroy the medical system much faster than COVID-19.
Effective grocery store prices are 2x - all of the sales have been removed. Eggs in Queens went from $1.69/dozen to $7.99 a dozen.
$1200 tax credit for 2020 ( this is what it actually is ) is nothing for people who live and support high cost areas which are the people who allow for the white collar jobs to exist.