Let’s be real here, there are more and more feces being thrown at the fan with every passing day. Everyone’s lives are being impacted by the raging Covid-19 virus, from random and once seemingly insignificant things to the very actions that define our individual place in the world. The fact of the matter is, things are going to change whether we like it or not. In order to help you get started on understanding some of the random things that might be affected by Coronavirus, I have prepared the following list of 10 things that may very well never be the same again.
These monuments to capitalism were barely hanging in there to begin with. Now that there’s a pandemic on, getting as many people into an enclosed space as possible isn’t exactly the best business model. Between that and the security and convenience of online shopping, malls just won’t be able to compete anymore. The most action they’ll see at this point is being used as emergency quarantine zones. Then again who knows? I’m no fortune teller, and maybe if this madness can get wrapped up before the Christmas season (pun not intended), perhaps they’ll survive this after all.
The physical market is going to take a beating. Like I said, the security and convenience of the internet simply can’t be beaten at a time where the whole world is confined to their homes. This could potentially be beneficial to food-related services, with the steady refinement of drive-up grocery and food delivery apps and whatnot, assuming these services shift their focus entirely to this method. Unless other stores make similar changes to cater to a society confined and isolated, Amazon is going to own everything soon enough. Or maybe all the surviving companies will simply sell out to Amazon in the interest of their own self-preservation until it becomes an all-encompassing monopoly, who knows? Gotta admit though, it’s damn convenient.
This is one surprisingly positive thing for our list of random things that are going to be affected by coronavirus: the strengthening of neighborly bonds. People are saying hello to one another in passing whilst walking their pups, groups of 3-5 people spend their evenings around bonfires (6 feet apart of course), and people are singing in tandem through the streets of Italian cities. We are learning a new appreciation for social contact and community. Perhaps it wasn’t our phones or the internet ruining our sense of community, but rather our overpacked schedules and constant rushing through one social interaction after the next that had made socializing into a grueling chore. I suppose you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone, and in this case, the saying goes on a societal scale.
We live in a fast-paced society, where too many hours aren’t enough, and on top of this, the maintenance of hobbies and social appearances, both online and otherwise, is a perpetual chore. Now the collective world government has deemed it necessary that we stay inside, slow down, and appreciate life, our loved ones, and what time we have. Or maybe you’ve just been rocking back and forth on your floor like a mental patient out of boredom. Who’s to say?
You’re stuck inside. Odds are, even if you were do gather the gumption to leave against the advice of the federal government, the grocery store is going to be far from well-stocked. It’s time to dust off your culinary skills and get creative! Don’t worry, society hasn’t collapsed to the point where Google is offline, so it should be relatively easy to get recipes that use instant ramen, canned beans, frozen foods, and whatever else you can scrape out of the bottom of the grocery stores metaphorical barrel. At the very least, this epidemic will give us a new appreciation for how expansive our food selection was before it was all gone.
Sometimes I swear it seems like some places were preparing for this… I live in Colorado, a state in which the sale of alcohol in grocery stores and gas stations just became legal. Before the epidemic, their prices were already undercutting the locally-owned liquor stores. Now gas stations, grocery stores, and even marijuana dispensaries have all been labeled essential services. Liquor stores are supposedly supposed to fall under the same category, but when people are encouraged to reduce the number of stops they make when running errands, liquor stores are bound to suffer.
Prior to this epidemic, there was a dwindling of interest in video games that gave its players the ability to deeply participate with other players and friends in role-playing and world-building, such as Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V for example. Now, these games are being revisited in a desperate attempt to reconnect with people. At once they were losing popularity, but now they’re being rebooted and appreciated for the great games that they are. Perhaps it’s simply out of a lack of quality video games being produced of late, but now there’s no better way to continue connecting with the homies that through your favorite games from the old days.
We’re discovering a lot about ourselves through this new plague of ours. For one, we’re learning that jobs we’ve been getting told can’t be done at home, can, in fact, be done at home. Granted, some jobs simply can’t be done at home, and those who have said jobs might have lost them. To those people I say, keep your ears to the ground (figuratively speaking), because there’s about to be a whole slew of new jobs that you can do from home from companies that will be adapting to the new conditions of employment that are inevitably going to be set in place, assuming that the situation continues to worsen that is.
With the new increasing enforcement preventing large scale congregations, the first ones that are inevitably going to take a hit are factories. While this screws over the job market a bit, on the brighter side of life we might expect a more swift recovery of the world’s ecosystem.
The importance of hygiene and cleanliness in American society seems to come and go with the pandemics, but let’s be honest, this one is going to be a friggin’ doozer. With any hope, it’ll stick this time – though hopefully not to the point where it turns into some dystopian novel where people are executed for not washing their hands according to code.
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