The New York Times - USA (2020-07-22)

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020 B1

N

TECH ECONOMY MEDIA FINANCE

4 VIRUS FALLOUT

Efforts to curb

pandemic-related racism

against Asian-Americans

have fallen to P.S.A.s.

7 SQUARE FEET

The self-storage industry

once looked virtually

recession-proof, but not now,

as people hunker down.

10 SPORTS

Michael Bennett, one of the

N.F.L.’s leading voices on

race and police brutality,

announced his retirement.

In the bedroom of her East Village apartment, Alison

Mazur relaxed into her chair and sighed contentedly

while an aesthetician coated her nails in taupe pol-

ish. It was the first professional manicure-pedicure

she’d had in four months, since coronavirus restric-

tions forced salons across the country to close their

doors.

Ms. Mazur had to put her normal beauty regimen,

which included regular manicures, on hold during

the pandemic. But between anxiety about the virus

and the stress of running her photography business,

she eventually realized she wanted to take a little

time for herself.

“I was like, what the heck, I live in New York City

— there’s got to be a company that’s doing something

to accommodate self-care during this time,” she said.

A Google search led her to MySpa2Go, which is

based in the city and provides at-home nail services,

waxing, facials, makeup, eyelash extensions, hair-

cuts and massages, for a premium price. A deluxe

manicure-pedicure runs $125, notably higher than

the usual price at a New York City nail salon.

“Considering that I hadn’t gotten one in so long, it

was a special treat,” Ms. Mazur said.

Before the pandemic, getting a manicure, buying a

movie ticket, attending an exercise class or going on

a shopping trip were relatively affordable pastimes

for the upper-middle class. But the virus has increas-

ingly made these pursuits even more exclusive —

available at a premium for those affluent enough to

enjoy them in a private setting.

Miss going to the movies? For about $350, you can

rent an entire auditorium at Moviehouse & Eatery, a

luxury theater chain in Texas. Eager to get back to

Alison Mazur receiving a manicure-pedicure in her East Village apartment from Dragana Milanovic of MySpa2Go, a company based in New York. Demand for services has quadrupled since the pandemic, said MySpa2Go’s owner, Lori Traub.

NATALIE KEYSSAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Getting Through It All, Lavishly

The coronavirus is turning everyday

pleasures into extravagances available

only to the well-to-do, from in-home

spa treatments to $350 movie tickets.

By GILLIAN FRIEDMAN

CONTINUED ON PAGE B5

Walmart calls its employees
“heroes” for putting their health
at risk to work during the pan-
demic. AT&T champions
L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Microsoft is
undertaking one of the country’s
most ambitious corporate efforts
to eliminate its carbon emissions.
At a time when Corporate
America is speaking up on some
of the most important issues of
our time, there is a contradiction
between companies’ words today
and the role they played in help-
ing create the moment we find
ourselves in.
An examination of political
spending over the past decade
shows how those companies —
and dozens of other Fortune 500
corporations — quietly funded

Corporations

Hurt Causes

With Giving

CONTINUED ON PAGE B6

Andrew Ross Sorkin

DEALBOOK

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — South Ko-

rea has been praised for making

effective use of digital tools to con-

tain the coronavirus, from emer-

gency phone alerts to aggressive

contact tracing based on a variety

of data.

But one pillar of that strategy, a

mobile app that helps enforce

quarantines, had serious security

flaws that made private informa-

tion vulnerable to hackers, a soft-

ware engineer has found.

The defects, which were con-

firmed by The New York Times

and have now been fixed, could

have let attackers retrieve the

names, real-time locations and

other details of people in quaran-

tine. The flaws could also have al-

lowed hackers to tamper with

data to make it look as if users of

the app were either violating

quarantine orders or still in quar-

antine despite being somewhere

else.

In interviews, South Korean of-

ficials acknowledged that they

had become aware of the security

Quarantine App Left Data Exposed

Defects were found in a tool used to track the coronavirus in South Korea.

WOOHAE CHO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Choe Sang-Hun, Aaron Krolik,

Raymond Zhong and

Natasha Singer

CONTINUED ON PAGE B4

WASHINGTON — For companies

with supply chains that snake

around the globe, the crises have

just kept coming: First the pro-

longed and painful U.S.-China

trade war, then a pandemic that

snarled shipments, stalled inter-

national travel and shut factory

doors.

President Trump and his advis-

ers have seized on the disruptions

to make a familiar case to manu-

facturers: Come back home.

“The global pandemic has prov-

en once and for all that to be a

strong nation, America must be a

manufacturing nation,” Mr.

Trump said at a Ford factory in

Ypsilanti, Mich., on May 21.

“We’re bringing it back.”

Mr. Trump has spent much of

his presidency trying to cajole

manufacturers to return to the

United States, through both tough

talk and policies like tariffs. His

advisers have pointed to both the

trade war and the pandemic as ev-

idence that it is just too risky for

multinational companies to rely

on other countries, particularly

China, to make their goods.

But those arguments have yet

to result in a wave of factories re-

turning to the United States. For-

eign direct investment into the

United States — which measures

spending from internationally

owned companies to start, expand

or acquire American businesses

— sank drastically last year, to its

lowest recorded level since 2006.

Foreign-owned companies in-

vested about half as much in the

United States in 2019 as they did in

2016, the year before Mr. Trump

took office. After increasing in the

first two years of Mr. Trump’s

presidency, the number of manu-

Trade War and Pandemic,

But No ‘Blue-Collar Boom’

By ANA SWANSON

and JIM TANKERSLEY

300,000

The decrease in the number of U.S.

factory jobs since President Trump

was inaugurated.

CONTINUED ON PAGE B6