They are going to seek someone who can fill that space and the most likely candidate is going to be the business that is in there, the local diner.

TheyвЂ™ve lost a lot of rent and need to generate some cash. When things reopen, what happens to the local diner? The person or entity operating that building is going to be desperate to fill it. The local diner has not paid rent for a year and neither has the Cheesecake Factory. Restaurants are destroyed as a business model. LetвЂ™s say, worst case scenario, weвЂ™re in some type of lockdown on and off for the next 12 months or more. But only Cheesecake Factory missing a rent payment is a life-threatening problem.

Both are going to have ongoing utility costs and other overhead expenses that are difficult, sometimes impossible, to cut back. Both are having to deal with inventory going bad and becoming a loss. Why is this news with the Cheesecake Factory?Д«oth the local diner and the Cheesecake Factory are being forced to lay off employees. Obviously, there are a lot of landlords that are going to be missing rent checks. So what? IвЂ™m sure the local diner here in town is also not going to be paying their rent. Last week, the Cheesecake Factory announced that they will not be paying their rent. In the future, the entrepreneurs will come back. The person who has a half million dollars in net worth (the minimum franchise requirement) and a quarter million dollars in cash on hand who is looking for a place to put it where it can earn an above-market rate of return is an investor. The person who starts the local doughnut shop because they have a passion for doughnuts and want to make a living providing them to people within the community is an entrepreneur. That story has become core to the Strong Towns narrative because it essentially describes the difference between an investor and an entrepreneur. Six years ago, I wrote about what it takes to start a Dunkin Donuts franchise. They will also be valuable as we make plans for what rebuilding needs to look like if we want our places to be stronger and more prosperous. My insights will not be comforting to small business owners, but might help those (like my daughter) who wonder if we will have a city left when this is over (we will). I want to give the anxiety some perspective and give a little hope to those of you sitting on the sidelines wondering how this will work out. Having businesses shut down amid quarantine is a nightmare for those business owners who are forced to lay off friends and trusted colleagues, not knowing if their enterprise will survive to rehire, or even reopen. The anxiety over job losses, business loss, and the potential for an eventual recovery are very real, for my daughter and anyone who is likewise thoughtful. ItвЂ™s a sad commentary on the fractured state of America that adults canвЂ™t have this conversation. There are enormous public health risks (and economic risks) for resuming commerce. There are enormous public health costs to keeping American businesses closed, especially for the poor. The hyper-partisan environment we find ourselves in makes reasonable discourse fraught, even at a time when we desperately need reasonable conversation. The discussions being had on the tradeoffs between public health and the economy are ridiculous, at best. If not, weвЂ™ll have a lot of economic damage, but weвЂ™ll also have a lot of physical human suffering.

If so, there will be a lot of second-guessing over the economic damage. I told her the truth: the next couple of weeks will tell us whether, by all of us staying isolated, weвЂ™ve been successful in slowing the virusвЂ™ spread. SheвЂ™s a very smart kid, and IвЂ™ve found her anxiety is soothed more by my being honest and direct than with any attempt to soften the situation. She was concerned about her grandparents getting sick or worse, whether my wife or I would lose our jobs, how she was going to do remote schooling and whether there would be any city left to go back to. WeвЂ™ve had zero COVID-19 patients thus far, a number they expect to change soon, and she was concerned about that eventuality. WeвЂ™ve been taking daily walks as a family the past two weeks and this weekend, as we walked past the hospital, my understandably anxious 15-year-old daughter had a lot she wanted to talk about. JosephвЂ™s Hospital, the largest medical facility in my county.

Cheesecake factory locations