A New Normal: Business In A Time Of Pandemic

This is gonna take a while.

A long, long while.

So yesterday a new study came out that predicts abound 2 million deaths in the U.S., if everyone tries to just go about their business as usual.

That’s … really quite bad, actually.

So let’s not do that, OK?

They also predict that we can keep the deaths down to around 100 thousand, if we get pretty extreme on rearranging how we do things (and if we maintain that rearrangement until there is a vaccine available, which will probably be around 2 years).

And that’s the best we can do: the 100 thousand deaths are already on the way and there’s pretty much bugger all that we can do about that.

But we can stop the 2 million deaths.

If we make some major changes now and keep it up for 2 years.

On that front, major kudos go to my local worker-owned grocery store (Community Market) who have gone full-on with this:

no customers in the store building
orders taken by phone, Internet or walk-up
no returning re-usable containers
credit cards only

(That last may be unnecessary and may not work well; going touchless phone-based payments would obviously work better than cards.)

If they go further and extend their hours to spread out work shifts then they’ll be doing pretty much all they can.

And by doing it now they’re dramatically improving how effective it will be and are preparing themselves for a long-term adjustment.

So that’s great.

The local Safeway, on the other hand, appears to have not changed anything. That’s really bad, both for them and for their customers.

They really need to do much better.

As I said yesterday (in Don’t Get Comfortable: Quarantine, Evacuation, And Curfew): now is a time when you can prove that you’re smart enough and have the will necessary to deserve the freedom we teach our schoolkids to value so much.