What Comes Next?
Nine weeks into quarantine, we are starting to ask what comes next?
Here are some thoughts.
Many trends happening before the virus will now accelerate. Some of this is good, some bad depending on your point of view.
Here are some examples:
E-commerce surges. The migration to online banking, shopping, watching, education and general gathering is exploding and will continue. Who benefits in that scenario? Big companies with lots of cash. Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Google to name three. It is really bad for small town retailers.
Amazon will grow more powerful. Bezos just announced he will spend $4 billion on worker safety and the development of Covid-19 testing. This is one of the more un-mentioned stories of the last two weeks. This is nothing less than a play to dominate the post-virus economy. Bezos is going to come out of the pandemic with a supply chain that is virus free. That means when you order your food and supplies and it arrives at your door, you are guaranteed that the product, the box, its wrapping is all virus free. Make no mistake, Amazon is now in the health care business. They will be in the insurance business. They are innovative and they are powerful. And they know everything about us. Anti-trust?
Contact/Distancing - The Amazon example tells us that we are headed for a contactless culture coming out of this. How do you live without touching elevator buttons, doorknobs, restaurant menus? How do you reduce the chances of exposure? Restaurant menus will go away, replaced by blackboards or electronic monitors. New kinds of key chains have already been introduced to push buttons and open doors. AirBnB will roll out COVID-free certified stays. The real estate industry will guarantee COVID-free home showings. Movie theaters will have robots scoop your popcorn.
Inequality - the virus has peeled back the curtain on the wealth created for executives and shareholders at the expense of the under-educated and non-wealthy. Market efficiency has made billionaires out of lots of people. But we still have Uber drivers with no health insurance working for $8.75 per hour. The question coming out the pandemic lockdown will be whether we want to continue our Hunger Games mentality of wanting everything cheaper or whether we want to value fellow humans.
Education - This could be a silver lining. The closing of schools forces us to rethink the gathering of millions of children in antiquated, inefficient buildings for education based on an agriculture economy. Trends in renovating the education system can accelerate here. Scrap the old buildings and the daily gathering. Online learning will improve. Homework can be done during the day. Teachers can become individual and team coaches. Wealthy private colleges and big public systems with huge student bodies will fare well. Small private colleges without big endowments are in trouble.
I’m no doctor or economist. But at some point, you have to put on your mask, wash your hands a lot and get out in the world. With no leadership from the White House (Business mogul Barry Diller just called Trump a with doctor), we are on our own.
With more than 15 percent unemployment and no end in sight, we are in a recession/depression for 3-5 years. There will be innovation coming out of this and that’s exciting. But the go-go days of Republican tax cuts and Democratic wishes for Medicare for All are over, replaced by incremental strategies of survival.
