All of my food service clients are taking a major hit - restaurants, bakeries, candy shops, etc. It's really,
really bad for them. Pickup & delivery options are picking up, but it's nowhere near the same scale as having daily dine-in visitors. No matter how popular a restaurant is, they're all kind of week-to-week businesses due to low margins; most of them make their money from various drinks (soda in particular, due to the markup) & not having people sitting down & ordering that stuff is really eating into the revenue required to keep these places afloat.
Depending on how long the lockdowns last, I unfortunately foresee some of them shutting down for good. I agree with Eater...the government needs to do a bailout for restaurants. I don't know what that will look like, whether it's financial aid or tax write-offs, but we have 150k+ restaurant workers in my state alone & a lot of people are hurting financially right now because of COVID-19, not to mention possibly not having a job at all in coming weeks & months:
America’s restaurant industry has never seen a crisis on this scale before
www.eater.com
I've pretty much done nothing but setup VPN's for the past week. The commercial vendors are getting swamped with requests; fortunately there are some good open-source options for companies who don't have paid appliances in place already.
I'm curious to see how our infrastructure handles having a massive amount of RDP users. Fiber is pretty prevalent in most areas now, and even my smaller customers have fiber-backed cable internet, and so far things are holding up pretty solidly. Modern server hardware can handle large user loads pretty well these days.
I have some buddies in school IT & hospital IT & they are just getting
slammed. Fortunately a lot of schools already have iPads, Chromebooks, Blackboard (ick), and Google services in place for online work The school IT departments are not just managing the situation for the next two weeks, but are expecting it to be out months, if not the rest of the school year. For schools that are prepared, it will be a non-issue, but I think shipping replacement parts in for stuff like iPads & laptops will be an issue long-term over the coming months due to importing from China & other supply-chain logistical issues.
What a mess. This really goes to show how unprepared we are for stuff like this. I think situations like this are a good wake-up call for us to beef up our infrastructure & also get our acts together on a personal level. I suspect stuff like this will only get worse as time goes on...we're approaching 8 billion people with a global supply chain that is highly dependent on everyone doing their part, and a virus just shut the world down. Pretty crazy from a business perspective, not to mention how it's affected the stock market, people's anxiety levels, etc.