Depression-style breadlines and soup kitchens are forming on Mar-a-Lago’s doorstep.
Howley’s – a historic diner built in the 1950s and resurrected by The Subculture group in 2004 – has put its kitchen staff to work handing out free meals to the area’s suddenly jobless restaurant and resort workers.
“On Saturday at Howley’s Restaurant the sound of music and the smell of ribs was in the air as cars lined up stretching three blocks down the street [and] people were welcomed by volunteers from Hospitality Helping Hands”, a local NBC affiliate wrote last week, describing the scene.
“It’s just a four-minute drive across the lagoon from Mar-a-Lago and ten minutes from the Palm Beach outposts of Chanel and Louis Vuitton”, Bloomberg helpfully points out, adding that “the rows of brown-bag lunches and dinners are an early warning that the country’s income gap is about to be wrenched wider as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, and the deep recession it has brought with it”.
More than 10 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits over the past two weeks alone.
“I never thought I’d see such a [thing] in my lifetime”, the only analyst who correctly predicted that the record number of filings from the week of March 21 would double the following week, lamented on Thursday.
The 6.65 million jobless claims filed during the week of March 28 were more than 10 times the previous record set in 1982.
Friday’s jobs report showed the US economy shed more than 700,000 jobs last month. That was prior to many of the state and local lockdowns imposed after the survey period for the report. The read-through is that April’s figures will be far worse.
Underscoring how hard the leisure and hospitality industry has been hit, the BLS said Friday that employment in the sector accounted for two-thirds of the total job losses reflected in the March headline number. That loss (some 459,000 leisure and hospitality positions) nearly wiped out all the gains over the previous two years.
Out of that 459,000 decline, 417,000 was accounted for by the “food services and drinking places” category. To call the situation dramatic would be to grossly understate the case. Below is a poignant visual which drives home the point (note that job losses in the category during the financial crisis appear as blips on the proverbial radar screen by comparison).
The tragic irony here is that these are the people who, in normal times, prepare and serve food and drinks to the public. The fact that servers and mixologists at high-end restaurants can make quite a bit of money notwithstanding, many of these workers live paycheck-to-paycheck (for the kitchen staff) and shift-to-shift (for front-of-the-house workers like waiters and bartenders). That means they may soon run into problems feeding themselves.
The linked Bloomberg piece above includes an interview with Rodney Mayo, who has 17 locations in the restaurant group that owns Howley’s. He let 650 people go on March 20, and began handing out free meals in the parking lot less than 24 hours later.
“They were asking ‘Where do we go? What do we do?’ All I really had was the unemployment site that was crashing and nobody could file anything on it”, Mayo said, in the interview. “But I did promise them: No matter what, you and your families will get fed by us. And I said tomorrow we’ll be open at Howley’s”.
That promise quickly extended beyond his own workers thanks to charities, suppliers and other area restaurateurs. The effort has distributed more than 15,000 meals so far, and Mayo said he’ll likely still be doing this in June.
“It means a lot. I mean it’s a great help, you know what I’m saying?”, one man interviewed by the local WPTV said, during last Saturday’s “Fourth of July BBQ in March” event at Howley’s.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to continue but you know, I thank God for it”, he added.
H-Man, the snowball is just coming down the mountain, as it picks up speed, it will pick up mass, until it implodes at the bottom of the mountain.