Death by a thousand paper cuts. As an example, the local breakfast shop. The owner claimed he couldn't find cheap employees anymore, they all left to sit at home on unemployment (his words, not mine). He also bemoaned the additional time for sanitizing everything. I saw his quality of food go down, and he didn't transition back to using real utensils (this is a major downside for me, thin plastic cutlery stinks).
Further, they didn't adapt digitally to the take-out heavy model. The prices went up across the board, too. You get a worse meal for 10% more than you used to get a good meal.
A multivariate model of all the inputs would show that many variables matter. They're losing demand, they're paying more for inputs, they're not able to get employees, rough spiral to be in.
