E C O N O M I C S
44
22
Edited by
Cristina Lindblad● U.S. businesses staggering
along on stimulus may collapse
before a fresh round arrivesThis was supposed to have been a good year for
zombies. At least that’s what Kevin Kriess, who
owns the Living Dead Museum & Gift Shop in
Evans City, Pa., thought. The business, not far
from the cemetery where George Romero filmed
the 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead,
was gearing up for an expansion. Kriess planned
to open a second location at a mall a 45-minute
drive away, where the sequel Dawn of the Dead
was set. “This year was going to be super big for
us,” says Kriess, a horror-movie buff turned pur-
veyor of T-shirts, posters, and other memorabilia
to obsessed fans of the undead.
Instead, in October, he packed up his ghoulish
wares and turned off the lights for the last time in
the storefront he’d rented across from a funeral
home. With almost 300,000 dead and millions dis-
placed from their jobs, Kriess’s troubles hardly reg-
ister on the economic damage scale. But his story is
representative of the broader experience at the end
of a calamitous year. Much of the economy remains
in suspended animation—a zombie recovery—whichmasks how much the crisis has curtailed ambitions
and how much depends on a new injection of gov-
ernment aid that has languished for months in a
partisan Congress.
Hope is on the horizon in the form of a vaccine.
But an economy that seemed over the summer to
be roaring back to life is facing a dark winter. In
November, the U.S. created just 245,000 jobs. At
that pace it would take three and a half years to
get employment back to February’s levels. Now,
as Covid-19 infections surge to record highs, states
are imposing new restrictions.
The U.S. economy is likely to end the year
almost 3% smaller than at the start. That’s not bad
consideringwherethingsstoodinthesecondquar-
ter,whenoutputplungedatanannualizedrateof
morethan30%.ButforKriessandmanyotherbusi-
nessownerswhowentinto 2020 thinkingthey’dbe
ridinganexpansion,it feelsworse.Atthebegin-
ningof 2020 theeconomywasexpectedtogrow
atleast2%.Thatmeansit’sclosingtheyear5%
smallerthanit wouldhavebeen.
Aswiththevirus,theimpactoftheCovid- 19
recession has been unequal. Although millions
in the leisure and travel industries remain out of
work, other Americans will emerge unaffected
economically, and perhaps better off. That pat-
tern holds true in Butler County, which straddles PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROSS MANTLE FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK