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uhsguy  ·  1454 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

I hate to say it but prune is dead, she should have shut it down with the last bit of liquidity she had and paid the legal retainer for bankruptcy liquidation, paid the vendors she liked with what she had left, paid herself a salary for a few more weeks and called it a day.

This crisis will wipe out everyone who is leveraged and has high debt load and that basically means every restaurant out there that was established in the last decade in any of the expensive major cities. Farmers are probably going to feel a similar pain but there arent really that many left due to previous rounds of this. Thats not to say that restaurants are dead, new ones will emerge out of this buy up space and equipment at a pennies on the dollar and be able run reduce costs. Even if Prune had loans and the liquidity to survive this their fixed costs would drive them out because others will be able to come into the space with much lower capitol and rent costs.

This is theoretically not a bad thing because it is supposed to reward people who were prudent with their money, but reality is that the people that were the most reckless will just get bailed out and get access to money printed by the fed. People like this lady will have everything taken from them (thanks to personal guarantees on business loans).

Next couple years we are probably going to see the largest wealth transfer in the last century, a lot of things that were "owned" by the middle class will get bought up by insiders with access to unlimited funds then rented back out to the previous owners. Its not just restaraunts either, a lot of people will loose cars and houses to this that will then get repossessed by connected institutions/individuals and then rented back to the poor suckers that lost them at a hefty profit. My bet the end result is that the author of this piece will end up running a restaurant that's owned by some PE firm that has access to capitol a few years from now having lost all her assets along the way, and thats going to be the story of many Americans.

Shit's gonna get real dark real quick for the middle class, hell its already been that way many just didn't realize it till now.