It’s all going to fall, eventually.
Realistically speaking, most small businesses will be gone in a few months. The ones that survive are likely to fall in the upcoming Outbreak 2.0 that will happen once the weather gets cold again and the government shuts everything down again.
About a third of small businesses forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic say they won’t be able to reopen due to an inability to pay bills or rent, a Facebook survery has found.
More than half of the business owners surveyed by Facebook have also said they don’t expect to be able to rehire the same amount of workers that they employed prior to the pandemic.
Facebook surveyed 86,000 small and medium-sized business owners, managers and employees for its State of Small Business report that was released on Monday as part of a data initiative with the World Bank and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The report highlights the lasting impact the pandemic will have on smaller businesses despite the $660 billion in aid the government set aside to help.
Of the one-third that haven’t yet been able to reopen, about 34 percent said it was because they couldn’t afford to pay their rent or bills.
About 44 percent of small business owners said they had to reduce the number of employees as a result of the pandemic and 22 percent had to fire more than 10 people.
Only 45 percent of business owners said they would be able to rehire the same employees they had to let go or furlough when they reopen.
That’s what they’re saying now, but once it becomes clear that no one will have any money, these businesses are also likely to shrink or disappear.
The US economy lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April – the steepest plunge since the 1930s Great Depression – when the unemployment rate spiked to 14.7 percent.
More than 40 percent of owners said they would have to use personal savings to reopen and rehire employees.
Meanwhile, 30 percent of business owners and managers said they weren’t yet sure where they would secure the money to reopen.
‘Despite the 50 percent decline in sales, we still have to pay 100 percent of our fixed costs,’ one business owner said in the Facebook report.
‘This is impossible. Rent was already high. Now it makes up 50 percent of our gross income.’
That 50 percent decline in sales will eventually turn into a 90% decline in sales because there’s just no way for people to be productive while respecting the current social distancing and lockdown policies.
Businesses not making any money results in employees getting fired, which in turn results in people not having any money to spend, which feeds back into businesses not having any money and having to fire employees because no one is buying anything.
Everything’s collapsing. If we’re going to have anything resembling an economy moving forward, it’s likely that it will have to be built from scratch on top of this new house arrest way of living. The old ways are not going to work anymore.
We’re beginning to see the actual purpose of the lockdown, which is this new society.
We know that the virus is about as dangerous as the flu and that anything other than closing schools and banning mass gatherings has a negligible effect on curbing the spread of the virus. The government had access to the data from both China and Italy when they enacted these bizarre measures based on false data that no one believes was real.
Everything done by the government only makes sense if they wanted this collapse to happen.