COVID Killed Kansas City Restaurant Biz: Here's The Damage

Local restaurants struggled to survive the pandemic and many didn't . . . 

The plaza hosts a great many smaller places that didn't survive along a bevy of empty venues in Westport, Brookside & Waldo.

Other than the P&L District . . . Downtown remains a restaurant wasteland. 

For the most part . . . COVID directed people back to chain foodie outlets for slop poured into a Styrofoam container. 

This isn't such a tragedy . . . 

People raised by po'folk or with memories of grandparent po'folk regard eating at restaurants as a luxury only afforded to the upper-class or an indulgence to celebrate major milestones. 

Also . . . Let us paraphrase a line from one of our favorite cancelled comics . . . 

"Every hooker I ever speak to tells me that it beats the hell out of waitressing."

 More on topic . . .

Let's not forget that a Jackson County controversy that exemplified the pressure on the local restaurant biz to obey arbitrary demands mostly devised by politicos and not epidemiologist. 

Or favorite rule from that era . . . 

In the aftermath, check the damage that isn't getting any better .  . .

Last year, there were about 631,000 restaurants in the United States, according to data from Technomic, a restaurant research firm. That’s roughly 72,000 fewer than in 2019, when there were 703,000 restaurants in the country.

That number could fall even further this year, to about 630,000 locations, according to Technomic, which doesn’t foresee the number of restaurants in the US returning to pre-Covid levels even by 2026.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Covid shrank the restaurant industry. That's not changing anytime soon | CNN Business

It's never been easy to operate a restaurant, and in recent years it's been even harder.