The pandemic made bartending more stressful. Is it better now?
Better Days is a modest dive bar with a pool table and a tiny backyard crease in the heart of Austin, Texas. Like many watering holes in the state, Better Days was given the green light to reopen last May, long before many patrons were even close to becoming vaccinated. That’s why 32-year-old bartender Isaac French felt like he was entering the line of fire when he went back to work.
Sure, he enforced all the Covid-19 rules and regulations as best he could, but procedural conduct tends to fade into the background once second and third rounds of drinks circulate through a crowd. The masks come off, the table mates huddle together, and for much of his time as a pandemic bartender, French expected to get sick. But after being out of work for months, that seeming inevitability was preferable to staying broke.
In many parts of the country, as vaccinations become increasingly available, Americans are just now getting accustomed to bellying up to bar settings again. New York allowed bars and restaurants to reopen at full capacity on May 19, and finally removed its midnight curfew on the May 31.
But in other states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, those restrictions were never so stringent. That means someone like French had plenty of experience serving drinks during the absolute bleakest months of the pandemic. We talked about the anxiety he felt after receiving the call to go back to work, what it’s like to kick out anti-maskers, and how the nightlife mood is changing in Austin now that he, and many of his patrons, are vaccinated.
What do you remember about your last shift before the pandemic?
My last shift was a Wednesday. I remember everyone talking about Covid at the bar. We were asking, “Is a shutdown gonna happen?” A lot of us were like, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” I thought it could happen, but at the time I was like, “Whatever, it’s busy. I’ll deal with a shutdown when it happens.” Sure enough, two days later, the shutdown came down.
What did you hear from management? How were you planning on keeping money coming in?
I was pretty stressed. It’s a small dive bar, owned by two owners and their wives. I was like, “Oh, this isn’t good.” You talk yourself into the break being like two weeks, or maybe a month. The managers are stressed, because bars never close down. That never happens. I was like, “We’ll figure it out, we’ll be fine.”
But I thought there was a good 60 to 70 percent chance that it was going to close permanently during the pandemic.
When did you guys open back up during the pandemic? When were you allowed to go back to work?
It was early summer, but I don’t remember the exact date. We’re a very small staff. It’s just me, my boss, and one other bartender. We took the opportunity to clean the place up, and we did some online Facebook donation drives. But we waited for a good while, like two weeks, after we were allowed to reopen before we did. But eventually my boss was just like, “Hey, we have to open up.” I was like, “That’s fine, let’s do it.”
You had been living through a pandemic for a while at that point. It must’ve felt pretty crazy to be serving drinks inside.
I was very nervous. I still take Covid very seriously. So do my bosses. We were like, “What can we do?” We decided to be very strict. And that’s tough. Sometimes it’s just me at the bar. We don’t have a door guy. Obviously I didn’t want to get sick, and of course one of our bartenders got Covid the third week back in. So we had to shut down again for another two weeks. I never got it, and I’m double-vaxxed now.
How seriously are the people still going to bars during the heat of the pandemic taking Covid-19? Are they throwing caution to the wind?
I’d say it’s like half and half. My regulars who came in were super cautious. They come in, they’re happy we’re reopened and that they can support us, they’re wearing masks and following all the procedures. Then, of course, there’s the other side: People that don’t understand that regardless of what the state is saying, this is our business and we can tell them what to do.
You have a lot of arguments like that, but one of the bad things about running a bar is once people get drunk, people stop caring and it’s a lot harder to control. After a while, I’m handling so many different things that I can’t babysit everything. You get desensitized.
What’s the first rule that starts to disappear when you hit round two or round three?
Absolutely the masks. People want to sit at the bar. At the time, we had three seats at the bar for social distancing. Then they get drunk, and they start walking around, and now nobody is wearing a mask.
Did you expect to end up catching Covid-19?
100 percent. It got to the point where I had zero dollars in my bank account. I was like, “I either have to get Covid and get this money, or be broke.” I was extremely upset with government leadership. We’re supposed to be essential workers, and they treat us like we’re not essential at all.
People are getting vaccinated. How has that impacted the mood at the bar?
It has been busier, but my bar is like Cheers. I have the same regulars every day. I see them every time I go to work. I have my solid family there. They’re always cool. It only feels weird when new people show up.
We still enforce the masks, and I’ve had people scream at me for that and just leave the bar. It’s funny. A lot of people who were anti-vaxxers are now being like, “Well, I have the vaccine.” And you’re just like, “No you don’t.” I’ve had to kick anti-maskers out. There would be people who’d try to fight us sometimes. I’m like, “You’re this mad? Just go to the bar over there!” That’s another thing you prepare yourself before your shift: How many anti-maskers am I going to have to deal with? I’m good with aggro people. I can kill them with kindness. I say, “Hey, it’s not my rules, I’m just trying to make a dollar,” and they’ll cool down. But some of them don’t!
What did it feel like after vaccination, when you knew you could go to work without worrying about getting sick?
It felt relieving. Every time I went out, even to the grocery store, I’d get nervous. And when you’re corralling drunk people who are screaming in your face, you get more nervous. It’s way less of a burden for me now.
How much are you looking forward to dropping the mask mandate, in a truly post-Covid world, where you can just do your job normally again?
It will feel good. I’m tired of doing that extra babysitting. If you’re a bartender, you babysit. That’s what you do. But with all these restrictions, it’s way more than you’re used to. I’m ready to go back to normal, and to have someone tell me their life story at the bar, without worrying about getting Covid.
“If you’re trading like it’s a game, you’re probably going to lose.”
It’s hard to argue that everything going on in financial markets lately is particularly smart. The question is, how silly should we let things get?
Meme stocks like GameStop are still swinging wildly as they go in and out of fashion on Reddit. AMC recently told people buying its stock that they’re probably going to lose all their money. People are piling into cryptocurrencies based on memes and learning some hard lessons in volatility, much of which is driven by Elon Musk’s tweets. The NFT bubble might have already popped because it turns out spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a GIF might not be the soundest investment.
Amid the chaos, there’s been quite a bit of hand-wringing among regulators, lawmakers, and finger-waggers on CNBC over what to do about it. Many investors are trading like it’s a game, and one that they are likely to lose — some knowingly, some not.
“Is there ever going to be a way to stop people from buying things at stupid prices? No,” said Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “There’s a key difference between people doing stupid things with their money versus being in positions where they’re either being exploited or manipulated.”
There’s a fine line between keeping people from taking too big of risks and locking them out of opportunities, between letting people do what they want with their money and keeping them from being swindled. How much to protect investors is a thorny question to answer — especially when sometimes they need to be protected from themselves, or they don’t want the protections at all. When I talk to day traders, the sentiment is often that they want to be able to take more risks, not fewer.
Speculation is hardly new; the same goes for gambling. Betting on a newly minted meme stock like Wendy’s or cryptocurrency like dogecoin isn’t all that different from playing blackjack, which is allowed. And Wall Street bigwigs take risks all the time, risks that can have major consequences for everyone. (See: the global financial crisis, or, more recently, the implosion of the hedge fund Archegos Capital that cost it and major banks billions of dollars.) The question regulators are facing right now as more and more people get into trading is which levers to pull and how much. There are plenty of ideas out there regarding what to do, such as increasing disclosures, shortening trade settlement times, or even banning certain practices and vehicles altogether. But new policies can come with certain trade-offs.
For example, people using free trading apps like Robinhood are probably not getting the best execution on their buys and sells, but if you take away the mechanisms that facilitate that — which the Securities and Exchange Commission says it’s looking at — that might mean trading will no longer be commission-free. Reasonable minds can disagree about whether that’s the right move to make. It probably wouldn’t keep tons of people away from investing — day trading existed long before Robinhood — but it might keep some people out.
More broadly, there’s a difference between being encouraged to make bad decisions with your money and being allowed to. It’s hard not to think it would be a good idea for newbie investors to have some more friction before making risky bets. Most day traders lose money, and it’s often the case that the more they trade, the worse they do. Risky options trading can be particularly hard to win at in the long run. The problem is, the companies facilitating commission-free trading make more money the more people trade.
That there should be strong legal protections for investors and consumers so they’re not taken advantage of shouldn’t be controversial in American politics. After all, no one wants to be part of a system where they don’t have a fair shot of winning. At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder if they already are.
“Why are all these meme stocks and crypto really popular? To some degree, there is hope that somehow I can magically make enough money to pay off these student loans, because otherwise, at the pace I’m going, there’s no way I can do that,” Park said.
If we want to stop people from YOLOing their savings into bitcoin or putting money into a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) whose business proposal seems like a blatant lie, we should also ask ourselves why they’re tempted to do so in the first place.
The era of meme investing is not necessarily an astute one
Some people are investing in meme stocks or cryptocurrencies or other risky assets because they genuinely believe in the underlying thing itself. There are people who really think crypto is the future, or hope GameStop can turn things around. But much of what is going on right now is decidedly not that. Matt Levine at Bloomberg Opinion got into the situation in a recent column:
The way to become a meme stock is not just to be good; companies don’t become meme stocks because Redditors endorse a widespread consensus that they are good operators in attractive markets. The way to become a meme stock is to be bad, then good; companies become meme stocks because Redditors get mad at hedge funds for shorting them, so they buy them, so they go up, and it’s fun and more Redditors join in.
The party is usually fleeting, but while it’s happening, for those involved, it can be fun. When it’s over, not so much. Some partygoers are left with varying degrees of a rough hangover. Every time there’s a big meme trade cycle, stories emerge of amateurs hitting it big on the upswing and suffering major losses on the downswing, sometimes days apart. When I talk to individual traders, I often hear the same story over and over again: They made some good bets early on, got overconfident, and then got wiped out. The hope is that people are playing with money they can afford to lose, but that’s not always the case. And sometimes, people wind up making trades they don’t even understand, with tragic consequences.
Tyler Gellasch, executive director of Healthy Markets, an investor-focused nonprofit, said he has concerns some of the meme stock trading is affecting the overall quality of and confidence in the market, a sentiment he’s not alone in. The whole idea of efficient markets is that capital flows to places where it will be put to good use, not businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. “You invest in companies to make money, but at the same time, we want the good companies to get the money and the bad companies to fail so that the good companies create jobs and things people will use,” he said.
The long term impact of $AMC</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24GME&src=ctag&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$GME isn’t about what happens to these companies or their stocks. It is about the public, which views the stock market (and economy) as something that is manipulated and not trusted.
— Andrew Ross Sorkin (@andrewrsorkin) June 2, 2021
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