The public debt before the virus hit was just over 20 trillion dollars and rising, which was bad. It was soaking up something like 7 percent of the budget just to pay the interest. We have just added over 2 trillion to that number in one fell swoop with more to come.
The taxpayer and their children and children's children will be paying for this forever.
It will change the way we shop and it might well spell the doom of whole lot of brick and mortar retailers, if they do not adapt rapidly and successfully to the realities of the new dynamics. In any event it will cost thousands of jobs in retail that will never return. Sears, which already on life support, is likely not going to be able survive. Several other big name stores are questionable. The virus has caused a really rapid change toward online buying, a trend that was happening anyway, but it has just accelerated the process.
In spite of the government actions, a lot of small businesses will not survive. While the government handouts continue to pay wages of employees of small business, it can't do anything about the actual decline in business.
The entertainment industry is not only suffering big time now, but will likely be effected for some time into the future. Movie houses are closed as well as sporting events not being held. I have heard talk of playing the beginning of the baseball season in Arizona to empty stadiums, depending on television coverage for revenue, I suppose. I don't know how that would work. It could be that they will end up copying what has happened to boxing. The games may be pay per view. The high salaries of the players as well as all the expenses associated with a major league baseball team have to be paid if they play.
It is possible the the major studios will have to follow that same format. First run movies will be streamed to the individual homes for a fee. Again I have no idea if that is workable, in an economic sense, considering the cost of a big screen epoch. Of course HBO produced the Game of Thrones, which must have really expensive to produce, for viewing by it's membership. There is no way of knowing if the series would have paid for itself if it had been offered as a pay per view. HBO did it to enhance their image and attract new customers. As televisions become larger and hopefully the sound systems become better, the move to big screen TV away from movie theaters may be the wave of the future. It probably was going in that direction anyway. The virus just accelerated the process.In fact it already been done with one major release and is apparently very successful.
Airlines are in real trouble with no one flying. As a result of that and with the expansion of electronic conferencing, the move away from traveling for business may well be accelerated. It is a lot cheaper and companies may well decide having people in the same room for face to face conferencing isn't all that important.
Grocery stores are hurting because so many of their customers are not leaving the house. The alternative is to have the groceries delivered. That is already happening. But, it is expensive. The common way for the delivery companies to make money is for them to charge more for an article than they have to pay to the grocer. For instance, a case of cokes at Costco costs about $12.40 and the delivery service, Instacart, charges the customer about $14.50.
