Back to Business?
A couple weeks ago, Stacey got vaccinated. The whole thing took less than ten seconds. It was surreal — just like that the whole world the whole economy felt like it had opened back up for her. All of these things seemed possible that hadn't just ten second before. To commemorate the occasion, Stacey decided to get her hair cut!
For over a year now, most of the service economy has been in a kind of suspended animation: restaurants, nail salons, movie theaters, concerts, spas, gyms, hair salons. Many establishments were closed due to lockdown, and millions of Americans have lost their jobs.
On The Indicator from Planet Money, Stacey talks with her hairdresser, Lisa Evans, and Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, to consider the future of the service sector. Now that people are getting vaccinated and things are opening back up, will the service economy bounce back to where they were before COVID? Will all of those millions of jobs come back? Or will the comeback be slow and painful, like it's been in past recessions?
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