Page 147 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

vicious and downward spiral and affecting ever greater numbers
of small businesses in a particular community. The ripples will

eventually spread beyond the confines of the local community,
affecting, albeit hopefully to a lesser extent, other more distant
areas. The highly interdependent and interconnected nature of
today’s economy, industries and businesses, comparable to the

dynamic linking the macro categories, means that each has a
rapid knock-on effect on the others in a myriad of different
manners. Take restaurants. This sector of activity has been hit by
the pandemic to such a dramatic extent that it is not even sure

how the restaurant business will ever come back. As one
restaurateur put it: “I, like hundreds of other chefs across the city
and thousands around the country, am now staring down the
question of what our restaurants, our careers, our lives, might look

like if we can even get them back.” [139] In France and the UK,
several industry voices estimate that up to 75% of independent
restaurants might not survive the lockdowns and subsequent

social-distancing measures. The large chains and fast-food giants
will. This in turn suggests that big businesses will get bigger while
the smallest shrink or disappear. A large restaurant chain, for
example, has a better chance of staying operational as it benefits
from more resources and, ultimately, less competition in the wake

of bankruptcies among smaller outfits. The small restaurants that
survive the crisis will have to reinvent themselves entirely. In the
meantime, in the cases of those that close their doors forever, the

closure will impact not only the restaurant and its immediate staff
but also all the businesses that operate in its orbit: the suppliers,
the farmers and the truck drivers.

At the other end of the size spectrum, some very large
companies will fall victim to the same predicament as the very

small ones. Airline companies, in particular, will face similar
constraints in terms of consumer demand and social-distancing
rules. The three-month shutdown has left carriers around the
world with a cataclysmic situation of virtually zero revenues and

the prospect of tens of thousands of job cuts. British Airways, for
one, has announced that it will cut up to 30% of its current
workforce of 42,000 employees. At the time of writing (mid-June

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