What this doesn't show is that with a few exceptions, the lifecycle of most of the upscale shops on Roncesvalles would come and go with the usual 2 year-business cycle. The holdouts were old places like Maple Produce, Aris Place, A Good Read, Polonez, Inter Steer https://twitter.com/desinthe6ix/status/1332330889255268354

while a good chunk of the old Polish character of the place had been gutted in the last decade there were still places run by locals. I think most retail operations are doomed to fail if they are brand new and don't own retail property.

the margins and precarity of small business is just being accelerated by this crisis. The ones who will last are owned by people who paid of their mortgages 20 years ago. Everyone else is gonna be squeezed by the scale of the multinats and Amazon.

Thinking of the two cafes that opened up in the last 6 years. one was Reunion Island, a test kitchen of sorts for the 30 year old coffee roasting corporation of the same name. The other was Gloria, run and owned by one guy who loved making sandwiches and didn't care about coffee

Gloria shut down last year before any of this kicked off. Reunion Island, I presume, will weather the storm of the pandemic just fine.