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Once, when I was finishing off the paperwork at a hotel where I had been staying with a group, I noticed what the company I was working for paid for the rooms we had used. It was well under half what an individual would have paid if he or she had walked in off the street and bought the same room. By promising to buy in bulk over the course of a year the company were able to beat the hotel chain down to what seemed an absurdly low price. (Empty rooms are of. no use to an hotel.) An individual who just needs to rest his/her head does not have the same negotiating power as a big company and has to cough up the full price for a decent night’s sleep.
The basis of many businesses is achieving bulk volume. Some concentrate on making a lot of money out of a little group but most aim to make a little money from a lot. Each sale produces a small profit – or even a loss if it brings in further sales – and a strong business’s selling power increases its buying power with their own suppliers.
Airlines are the classic example of making money from full houses and crowded spaces. They no longer rely on businesspeople charging the cost of their travel to expense accounts and not worrying too much about the size of the bill. Today they need to attract ordinary travellers, who invariably opt for the cheapest fare, even if it means flying on a crowded plane. The flight is over quickly enough and the savings are permanent. Tony O’Reilly, who made a fortune from packing people into planes, and for whom I have a begrudging admiration, has said that they will all go bust if they have to observe social distancing. British Airways has already laid off twelve thousand people as people stop flying.
One of the main jobs of those who deal with clients in crowded conditions – whether they are cabin crew, tourist guides or organisers of queues – is to make people feel welcome and wanted even as they are being packed together in uncomfortable crowded conditions.
Forgive me for stating the obvious here because in a month or two it will be far from obvious. When we go for a walk, usually in the late afternoon, we weave in and out amongst our fellow-exercisers keeping the required two metres social distance between us. People are understanding and good-humoured about this and we are more likely these days to say hello to and smile at other people even as we avoid coming too close to them.
It is not always possible, of course, and sometimes we come a little too near, particularly if we are shopping. The closest I get to another human being (apart from my partner) is once a week when I go to the checkout and pay for the weekly shop. I choose the shop on the basis of it not being crowded and I go when it is quiet, but you can never be fully safe.
What will happen when we start going back to normality as the lockdown ends? My business is tourism which, almost by definition, involves bringing large numbers of people into a small space. As I wrote in my other blog, when we go to Windsor, we often spend more time in the queue than in the castle. We would not mind a queue at the moment.
But in a queue, you are inevitably crowded together, cheek by jowl as Shakespeare says, and this is a great meeting place for germs and people. Two metres apart is simply not possible with lots of people all aiming for the same place at the same time. Likewise, nobody makes a living from an almost empty pub, hotel or theatre. The overheads remain the same while the income dries up as people avoid crowded space like, well, the plague.
Plague has come to us before, of course. Back in the Middle Ages about a quarter of the population died in many European countries as the black death spread through contaminated communities. A century ago we had the black flu which killed fifty million people, many of them soldiers who had survived the war only to be struck down by a deadly virus that arrived unseen as the fighting drew to a close. The crowded insanitary conditions in which the soldiers were billeted was ideal breeding ground for the virus and, without today’s social distancing, there was little chance of staying safe, as try to do today.
People were not even warned about the dangers. Newspapers were not allowed to spread news which might lower morale in wartime. Being neutral, Spain was able to report with more accuracy – and honesty – on the disease and this gave the impression that they were worse hit. In fact, the people of Spain were simply being given more information.
Today it is almost compulsory for news outlets to spread gloom. My experience, has been that most people have been reasonably cheerful about the outbreak, adjusting to the new normal of avoiding crowds, dodging and weaving during walks, missing the football and other events that have had to be cancelled and using video conferencing in which the sounds and images do not always match each other and those little signals saying who is going to talk next are strangely absent, so we alternate interruptions and awkward silences.
We will come out of this sooner or, preferably later, to be on the safe side. The habit of giving others a wide berth to stay on that safe side, will not die out for some time, however. The problem will be to rebuild a functioning economy while still allowing social distancing.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
