It isn’t really about hoarding. And there isn’t an easy fix.
Around the world, in countries afflicted with the coronavirus, stores are sold out of toilet paper. There have been shortages in Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And we all know who to blame: hoarders and panic-buyers.
Well, not so fast.
Story after story explains the toilet paper outages as a sort of fluke of consumer irrationality. Unlike hand sanitizer, N95 masks, or hospital ventilators, they note, toilet paper serves no special function in a pandemic. Toilet paper manufacturers are cranking out the same supply as always. And it’s not like people are using the bathroom more often, right?
U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar summed up the paradox in a March 13 New York Times story: “Toilet paper is not an effective way to prevent getting the coronavirus, but they’re selling out.” The president of a paper manufacturer offered the consensus explanation: “You are not using more of it. You are just filling up your closet with it.”
Faced with this mystifying phenomenon, media outlets have turned to psychologists to explain why people are cramming their shelves with a household good that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Read the coverage and you’ll encounter all sorts of fascinating concepts, from “zero risk bias” to “anticipatory anxiety.” It’s “driven by fear” and a “herd mentality,” the BBC scolded. The libertarian Mises Institute took the opportunity to blame anti-gouging laws. The Atlantic published a short documentary harking back to the great toilet paper scare of 1973, which was driven by misinformation.
No doubt there’s been some panic-buying, particularly once photos of empty store shelves began circulating on social media. There have also been a handful of documented cases of true hoarding. But you don’t need to assume that most consumers are greedy or irrational to understand how coronavirus would spur a surge in demand. And you can stop wondering where in the world people are storing all that Quilted Northern.
There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.
In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.
Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.
Boxes of Angel Soft toilet paper for the consumer market roll off the line at Georgia-Pacific’s paper mill in Palatka, Florida. Credit: Image courtesy of Georgia-Pacific
If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused.
So why can’t we just send that toilet paper to Safeway or CVS? That’s where supply chains and distribution channels come in.
Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills.
Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.
“Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills,” added Jim Luke, a professor of economics at Lansing Community College, who once worked as head of planning for a wholesale paper distributor. “So for instance, Procter & Gamble [which owns Charmin] is huge in the retail consumer market. But it doesn’t play in the institutional market at all.”
Georgia-Pacific, which sells to both markets, told me its commercial products also use more recycled fiber, while the retail sheets for its consumer brands Angel Soft and Quilted Northern are typically 100% virgin fiber. Eric Abercrombie, a spokesman for the company, said it has seen demand rise on the retail side, while it expects a decline in the “away-from-home activity” that drives its business-to-business sales.
In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins.
Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.
“The normal distribution system is like a well-orchestrated ballet,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you make a delivery to a Walmart distribution center, they give you a half-hour window, and your truck has to show up then.” The changes wrought by the coronavirus, he said, “have thrown the whole thing out of balance, and everything has to readjust.”
While toilet paper is an extreme case, similar dynamics are likely to temporarily disrupt supplies of other goods, too — even if no one’s hoarding or panic-buying. The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.
I’m absolutely convinced that very little was triggered by hoarding.
It’s all happening, of course, against the backdrop of a pandemic that makes it hard enough for these producers to keep up business as usual, let alone remold their operations to keep up with radical shifts in demand.
If there’s any good news, it’s that we can stop blaming these shortages on the alleged idiocy of our fellow consumers. “I’m absolutely convinced that very little was triggered by hoarding,” Luke said. Even a modest, reasonable amount of stocking up by millions of people in preparation for stay-at-home orders would have been enough to deplete many store shelves. From there, the ripple effects of availability concerns, coupled with a genuine increase in demand due to people staying in, are sufficient to explain the ongoing supply problems.
In the long run, the industry is still optimistic that it can adapt. “We’ve got fiber supply, we’ve got trees,” said Georgia-Pacific’s Abercrombie. “It’s just a matter of making the product and getting it out.”
In the meantime, some enterprising restaurateurs have begun selling their excess supplies of toilet paper, alcohol, and other basics. Last week I picked up takeout at a local restaurant with a side of toilet paper and bananas. The toilet paper was thin and individually wrapped. The bananas were puny. They’ll do just fine.
Returning to normal is too dangerous. Lockdowns are unsustainable. Let’s save lives without a depression.
For now, social distancing is the best America can do to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. But if the U.S. truly mobilizes, it can soon deploy better weapons—advanced tests—that will allow the country to shift gradually to a protocol less disruptive and more effective than a lockdown.
Instead of ricocheting between an unsustainable shutdown and a dangerous, uncertain return to normalcy, the U.S. could mount a sustainable strategy with better tests and maintain a stable course for as long as it takes to develop a vaccine or cure. The country will once more be able to plan for the future, get back to work safely and avoid an economic depression. This will require massive investment to ramp up production and coordinate the construction of test centers. But the alternatives are even more costly.
Two types of testing will be essential. The first test, which relies on a technology known as the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, can detect the virus even before a person has symptoms. It is the best way to identify who is infected. The second test looks not for the virus but for the antibodies that the immune system produces to fight it. This test isn’t so effective during the early stages of an infection, but since antibodies remain even after the virus is gone, it reveals who has been infected in the past.
Together, these two tests will give policy makers the data to make smarter decisions about who needs to be isolated and where resources need to be deployed. Instead of firing blindly, this data will let the country target its efforts.
Here’s a simple illustration of how test data can save lives. Every day millions of health-care professionals go to work without knowing whether they are infectious and might spread the virus to their colleagues. We both have close relatives on the front lines. As soon as one of them developed a cough, she pulled herself out of service. But at that point she may have been infectious for several critical days. If she and her colleagues had all been tested every day, her infection would have been caught earlier and she would have isolated herself sooner.
To be used as a screening mechanism at the beginning of a shift, the test would need to be able to give a result within minutes. Developers are making progress on speeding up these PCR tests—so much so that the aforementioned physician received the results from her second test, conducted five days after the first, before those from the first test. Abbott and Roche, two pharmaceutical companies, are moving forward with tests that can decrease reporting times from days or hours to minutes. Now that the doctor has recovered, an antibody test could help determine when she can return to the frontlines of patient care.
As testing capacity expands, the same tests could be offered to all essential workers, such as police officers and emergency technicians, and then to other overlooked but critical workers—pharmacists, grocery clerks, sanitation staff. The next step would be to test people throughout the country at random to get up-to-date information about who is infected now and who has ever been infected.
For those who are currently infected, governments can provide immediate assistance to make sure they don’t infect anyone else, especially family members. Those infected before who now have antibodies may be less susceptible to reinfection. If that is proved in the weeks to come, they could also return to work.
Putting this system in place will take resources, creativity and hard work. Test developers will have to increase the production rate of kits by an order of magnitude. In his work fighting Ebola in West Africa, Dr. Shah saw how a virus can cause a 30% reduction in economic output. Mr. Romer’s back-of-the-envelope calculation is that the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic has already caused a 20% reduction in U.S. output, which means the country is losing about $350 billion in production each month. If a $100 billion investment in a crash program to make antibody and PCR tests ubiquitous brought a recovery one month sooner, it would more than pay for itself.
Building this testing system would be complicated and require the best of American science, business and philanthropy working together. But it is the type of challenge that the U.S. has overcome before. It isn’t viable to wait a year or two for a vaccine before getting people back to work safely. To save lives and prevent a depression, testing on a massive scale is essential.
The bills are now coming due for big companies and millions of laid-off workers. Decisions made in the next few days will shape how coronavirus impacts the economy
Congress has passed a $2 trillion rescue plan but before those funds start to flow, American companies from the owner of a single liquor store in Boston to corporate giants like Macy’s Inc., must decide what to do about April’s bills: Which obligations do they pay and which can they put off? How many employees can they afford to keep on the payroll? Can they get a break on rent?
“Rent is due. Utilities are due. Credit card bills are due April 1,” said Hadley Douglas, who has laid off two workers from her liquor business, The Urban Grape. “The deadline is looming large and it is petrifying.” She said her landlord turned down a request to temporarily pay half the rent but said to keep in touch as it was focusing first on smaller, harder hit businesses.
Millions of Americans are suddenly out of work and many businesses have already closed under orders from state and local governments to close to prevent the spread of the virus. A record 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ended March 21.
The U.S. restaurant industry has lost $25 billion in sales since March 1, according to a survey of 5,000 owners by the National Restaurant Association. Nearly 50,000 stores of major U.S. retail chains have closed, according to the companies.
An estimated $20 billion in monthly retail real estate loans are due as early as this week, according to Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real-estate services and consulting firm. Many retailers and restaurants have said they are not going to pay their April rents, which in turn poses a threat to the $3 trillion commercial mortgage market.
Economic activity in the U.S. and other developed countries could be lowered by a quarter, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Friday.
Tyson Evans, a 23-year-old line cook for Cheesecake Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, said he and fellow workers were stunned to learn about the furloughs. He said they believed the company would continue to employ them despite a drop in business. He is now filing for unemployment.
“We keep this company going,” said Mr. Evans, who is currently living with his parents and worried about paying bills including his phone, grocery and prescriptions. He has started an online petition to urge the chain to keep paying furloughed workers.
Denise Burger, a 64-year-old Cheesecake Factory server in Escondido, Calif., said she was counting on the 36 hours of work the company had scheduled for her before the furloughs came down. Ms. Burger said she’s been contacting her mortgage and credit card companies to try and postpone payments.
“This pandemic has put much stress and strain on me,” said Ms. Burger, who is single and has worked for the company for six years in a job she loved.
California-based Cheesecake Factory said it would continue to provide health insurance for employees until June 1, and provide them a daily meal from their restaurants that remain open for take-out orders.
Cheesecake Factory has notified landlords that it won’t pay April rent. “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience and, frankly, your help,” wrote Chief Executive David Overton.
Owners of independent and small restaurant chains have also asked their landlords for rent relief, with mixed responses. Some say landlords are offering them deferments of several months, whereas others haven’t gotten much help yet.
“Landlords, if they are overly greedy, they could be losing us,” said Andy Howard, chief executive of Huey Magoo’s Restaurants, who is pleading for a break on rents for his Orlando, Fla., chicken tenders chain.
Residential and commercial landlords say they have been flooded with requests from individuals and businesses saying they will struggle to pay their rent for April and beyond.
“I feel like I’m running triage in a retail hospital out of my apartment,” said Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities Inc., which owns 122 retail centers, including shopping centers, malls and street-front retail locations in 25 states.
Mortgage firms are bracing for a wave of missed payments starting April 1 as borrowers lose their jobs. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say they will offer deferrals on home mortgages and postpone foreclosures. Auto dealers say consumers are calling to put off their April lease or loan payments.
Guy Hillel, 47 years old, got laid off from his job as a food and beverage manager at a Times Square hotel earlier this month after the property closed due to the outbreak. He is eligible for $504 a week in unemployment benefits, a fraction of what he was earning.
Mr. Hillel, who has a wife and two children, says it isn’t enough to cover the family’s expenses. He has called credit-card companies to negotiate payment extensions, and tried unsuccessfully to delay his monthly car loan for his family’s Volkswagen Tiguan sport-utility vehicle.
“It’s extremely stressful,” Mr. Hillel said. “It’s crazy: I’m more exhausted now than I was before when I had a job.”
Mr. Hillel estimates his family will receive some stimulus money, but not the full amount awarded to couples.
The federal economic stimulus program passed last week will provide direct payments to Americans as well as loans to large and small companies. The bill includes $350 billion to help small businesses keep people on their payrolls.
For employees, it increases current unemployment benefits by $600 a week for four months. It also provides one-time checks of $1,200 to Americans with adjusted gross income up to $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for married couples; individuals and couples are eligible for an additional $500 per child.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration aims to send out direct payments to individuals in three weeks and that banks should be able to originate same-day loans for small businesses in as little as a week.
Many business owners and individuals said they have little in the way of cash reserves or savings for bills that come due in the next few days. Some wonder whether the aid will be enough.
The Small Business Administration said the stimulus bill provides “small businesses with the resources they need to get them through this unprecedented time.”
America’s large, marquee retailers are also struggling.
Macy’s Chief Executive Jeff Gennette told suppliers last week that while he had hoped to reopen stores by April 1, that was highly unlikely. “While our digital business and call centers remain open, we have lost the majority of our sales,” Mr. Gennette wrote in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Macy’s has suspended its dividend and drawn down its credit line to bolster its cash. It has reduced pay for executives. It’s also canceling some orders and has doubled the amount of time it gives itself to pay suppliers, to 120 days. Nevertheless, Mr. Gennette wrote in the letter, the retailer may need to begin furloughing some of its 130,000 employees.
Nike has offered to pay 50% rent on its 384 closed U.S. stores, landlords say, and when the stores reopen, a percentage of sales in lieu of any rent for 12 months. Nike executives said they will continue to pay workers while the stores are shut.
“We are currently honoring all existing contracts with our landlords. In collaboration with our real estate partners, we provided a proposal looking at near and long term approaches that we believe will help ensure both parties remain viable business partners through this unprecedented time,” a Nike spokeswoman said.
Tapestry Inc., the parent of Coach and Kate Spade, extended U.S. and European store closures through April 10, but is continuing to pay store workers. “What will be important as we come out the other end is to have a committed team of people,” said Chief Executive Jide Zeitlin.
Mr. Zeitlin said the company is in negotiations with landlords about rent forgiveness and is looking at other expenses to cut aside from labor.
T.J. Maxx and Ross Stores Inc. have canceled orders through mid-June and are delaying payments to suppliers, according to people familiar with the situation. A T.J. Maxx spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Ross Stores didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Financial pressures are particularly intense for small business owners; In a typical community, about half of small businesses had less than two weeks of cash liquidity, according to a 2019 report by the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
Pennsylvania deemed auto repair an essential business, which allowed Tom Bemiller, the chief executive of The Aureus Group, to keep open his three repair shops in the Philadelphia area. Revenue is down 35% this month, he said.
“Customer after customer is telling us I am not going to get my car fixed until this blows over,” said Mr. Bemiller.
Mr. Bemiller said his priority is to pay his 25 employees and his suppliers. His bank is working to determine whether it can retool the terms of his company’s $450,000 loan to allow for interest-only payments and has increased its credit line by $50,000, enough to cover two weeks of payroll. Pennsylvania is letting him delay certain sales tax payments; American Express Co. has agreed to waive fees and interest if he delays his $270,000 corporate credit card bill for one month.
“Right now everything is on the table because we are in survival mode,” Mr. Bemiller said. “We are reaching out to all vendors and creditors and asking for help and trying to delay payments as much as possible.”
Mr. Bemiller has reduced his own salary. He hopes to defer payments on his mortgage, student loans, credit card bills and other expenses, but hasn’t had time to work on that yet because he’s been singularly focused on the business, which provides all of his family’s income.
At Envision Travel Holdings Inc., a travel agency with 11 offices, revenue has fallen by two-thirds in the past month and is expected to drop to near zero in the next month or so. The Las Vegas company, which normally has 40 employees and 25 independent contractors, has laid off four workers and cut hours by 20%.
All but one of Envision’s landlords has agreed to reduce rents, cutting payments to about $15,000 from $38,000, with missed payments tacked on to the end of the lease. The travel company put a hold on its 401(k) retirement savings plan and, for now, dropped its 50% contribution to the employee dental plan. “We are analyzing every expense, line by line,” owner Thomas Carlsen said.
“The universal advice we are giving tenants is don’t pay your rent and see what happens,” said Derek Wolman, partner at law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, which often represents bars, restaurants and hotels in lease negotiations. He said this is especially true in New York state, where there is pending legislation that would give 90 days of rent forgiveness to residential and commercial tenants who suffered financially as a result of Covid-19.
In Detroit, Bedrock, a developer and property owner created by billionaire Dan Gilbert, is offering free rent to more than 100 small businesses and restaurants from April to June. “Hopefully, they sense we’re in it to help them,” said Matt Cullen, chief executive of Bedrock. On Monday, Michigan ordered all non-essential businesses to close.
Smaller landlords who don’t have enough reserves to tide them through a prolonged pause in rent collection say they are in a precarious state.
“Why is the landlord the first line in bailing them out?,” said Corey Bialow, a small property owner. He owns a stake in 12 properties in different states including New Jersey and Massachusetts. He said he will be on the hook for additional costs beyond mortgages such as real estate taxes, maintenance and insurance and will have to dip into his savings to pay for these. “I’m personally on the hook.”
Coyote Hole Ciderworks, a three-year-old cider producer in Lake Anna, Va., saw an 80% drop in revenue after it was forced to shutter most of its operations.
Coyote typically employs seven workers most of the year and fifteen or more in the summer. Now, just co-owner Laura Denkers and one employee remain on the payroll; Her husband, Chris, has stopped taking a salary so the company can continue paying health insurance premiums. The Denkers’ 10-year-old twin sons have cystic fibrosis, which makes keeping health coverage crucial.
The small company has secured a 90-day reprieve on mortgage payments from its bank; Mr. Denkers plans to pay the minimum allowed on his corporate credit card and is trying to defer payments on equipment loans and other bills. “The next three weeks is the real crunch time when we need an influx of money,” he said.
Jodi Rodriguez, until recently director of retail and sales for Ovenly, a New York City-based wholesale and retail bakery that laid off all of its 72 employees, filed for unemployment March 18.
She wrote a letter to the landlord of the building she’s lived in for eleven years, asking for a temporary discount on the rent on her New York apartment. Ms. Rodriguez owns a rental property in Florida, but the tenant is a make-up artist who isn’t currently working. “I’m unsure whether she is going to pay or not,” Ms. Rodriquez.
“The hardest part right now is health insurance,” said Ms. Rodriguez, noting that coverage through Ovenly ends March 31.
Even businesses that have had gains are facing uncertainty. Ms. Douglas, the Boston liquor store owner, said in-store sales are up 130% over what she had budgeted, more than offsetting the collapse of her catering and event business. She’s keeping a close eye on cash flow and expenses, worried that she, her husband or one of their employees might get sick, that worker illnesses could disrupt her supply chain or that the state could order liquor stores to close.
Ms. Douglas is a member of a local business group in Boston’s South End neighborhood that recently surveyed more than 100 small firms. Most of the owners reported revenue is down by 90% or more in March, with monthly losses totaling about $8.5 million for the 72 businesses that provided specific figures.
“Every order we put in is nerve-wracking because we are so worried about getting stuck with product we can’t sell,” she added. “We are open today but that doesn’t mean we will be open next week.”
The billionaire Tom Golisano was smoking a Padron cigar on his patio in Florida on Tuesday afternoon. He was worried.
“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” said Golisano, founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.”
Tom Golisano
Photographer: Robert Rosamilio/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want the cure for the Covid-19 pandemic “to be worse than the problem,” and some of America’s wealthiest people and executives are echoing his rallying cry. They want to revive an economy that could face its worst quarterly drop ever — even if it means pulling back on social distancing measures that public health officials say can help stop coronavirus. These investors aren’t prizing profits over lives, they say, they’re just willing to risk some horrors to avoid others.
“You’re picking the better of two evils,” said Golisano, who wants people to go back to their offices in states that have been relatively spared by the coronavirus, but remain at home in hot spots. “You have to weigh the pros and cons.”
In New York, where hospitals are at a tipping point and getting pummeled by patients, Governor Andrew Cuomo says the economy shouldn’t be restarted “at the cost of human life” and that he’s developing a plan that “lets younger people get back to work.”
The question is when they should do it.
Trump, guided by a group of hedge fund and private equity titans, wants the country up and running again by Easter, though public health officials warn that’s too soon for a virus that’s killed more than 18,400 and infected at least 400,000 worldwide. Only companies with less than 500 employees are required to provide paid sick leave for workers out with Covid-19. Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000 lives nationwide.
Lloyd Blankfein, who ran Goldman Sachs Group Inc. until 2018, helped kickstart the calls to get back to work on Sunday when he tweeted that “extreme measures to flatten the virus ‘curve’” were sensible “for a time” but could crush the economy: “Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”
His longtime deputy, Gary Cohn, who left the bank to become Trump’s top economic adviser, asked if it was time “to start discussing the need for a date when the economy can turn back on.” Without clarity, businesses “will assume the worst,” he said.
Tilman Fertitta, owner of Golden Nugget casinos and Bubba Gump Shrimp, is calling on authorities to let businesses reopen at limited capacity in a couple of weeks to avoid a long economic disaster. Fertitta, who also owns the Houston Rockets and is worth $3.2 billion, said his company is “doing basically no business.” His demand goes against a school of thought that says prematurely reopening the economy could kill more people and eventually cause more economic harm.
Billionaires and other members of the elite have the luxury of social distancing while making money. The ones who want workers back in their jobs say they’re aiming to stop millions from suffering for years and falling further into debt. Officials are trying to accomplish that by restricting foreclosures and allowing Americans to defer mortgage payments.
“It’s outrageous,” said Robert Reich, who was labor secretary for President Bill Clinton and now studies public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is absolutely necessary to shut down the economy so that millions of people don’t die. For the privileged among us to fail to see that and to give the economy precedence over this public health emergency is morally reprehensible.”
The push to restart the economy makes a certain amount of sense to rich people, according to Reich, because they have come to expect disproportionate gains as the system’s top winners. “The one flaw in their logic this time is that the coronavirus doesn’t understand class,” he added. “The more people are infected, the more likely it is that Blankfein and other billionaires will become infected as well.”
Jim Conway was a server in an Olive Garden in Pennsylvania until it closed about two weeks ago. He’s been out of work and isn’t getting paid while his application for unemployment benefits gets processed.
“Being an older worker, I’m in no hurry to go back in the middle of an epidemic,” Conway, 63, said. “Being a server means you’re in contact with lots of different people, and puts you at bigger risk of getting infected. I’m kind of glad they closed when they did.” He wants the outbreak under control before the restaurant reopens, but worries that politicians and businesses tend to focus on their bottom line before people like him.
“They’ve never really had our interests at heart,” he said. “And now would be a weird time to start.”
One of those government officials, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, said on Fox News that Americans should get back to work and let “grandparents” take care of themselves.
Dick Kovacevich, who ran Wells Fargo & Co. until 2007, wants to see healthy workers below about 55 or so to return to work late next month if the outbreak is under control. “We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know,” said Kovacevich, who was also the bank’s chairman until 2009. “Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience?Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”
Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks, wants Americans to listen to epidemiologists instead. “Ignore anything someone like me might say,” Cuban wrote in an email. “Lives are at stake.”
