(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Top Comments: Open Thread [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-03-08 Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find! Tonight is an open thread night but you know I am not leaving you empty-handed. 1. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic reports that restaurants have pretty much recovered from COVID...to a point. First, although chains are thriving, independent sit-down locations are struggling. This is evident in both the labor and sales data. Employment at fast-food and fast-casual (think Chipotle) restaurants is up more than 100,000 jobs since the pandemic, according to the NRA. But full-service locations, where waiters attend to seated diners, are still several hundred thousand employees short of their totals from early 2020. According to The Wall Street Journal, from 2019 to 2023, sales for fast-food and other limited-service restaurants grew at twice the rate of sit-down-restaurant sales. Meanwhile, about 4,500 more independent restaurants closed than opened last year. Second, the recovery differs dramatically by region. The Northeast and Midwest still seem to be in a kind of dining recession, in part because of their lack of population growth. Almost every state east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon Line had fewer restaurant employees in December 2023 than they did four years earlier. (The happy exceptions were Illinois, New Jersey, and Delaware.) Meanwhile, across the South and through the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones, most states have seen a full recovery of restaurant jobs. If you trace your fingers from Idaho and Montana down through Arizona and Texas, every state you touch except one (sorry, New Mexico) has seen at least 4 percent growth in restaurant employment since the pandemic. A similar story holds if you compare cities in the booming West and stagnant Northeast. In Las Vegas, restaurant employment is significantly higher than it was before the pandemic. Meanwhile, in New York City, employment at full-service restaurants is still down about 30,000 from its peak. [...] Altogether, American restaurants are shifting from independent operators to chains, from slow food to fast(er) food, from east to west, from city centers to suburbs, from lunch and dinner to breakfast and late night, and from eat-in to takeaway. Even though Illinois is one of the “happy exceptions”, I have noticed some of these trends for independent restaurants here in the Chicago area but I also noticed that quite a few of the independent or small-chain (locally owned chains) restaurants that have closed down went out of business a little bit prior to COVID taking hold. A couple of fast-food restaurants also closed because the majority of their customers were Northwestern students. 2. Cody Benjamin of CBS Sports reports that some NFL fans suffered frostbite and even had to have amputations because of the severe cold for the Miami/Kansas City playoff game Thousands of fans endured record-cold temperatures and wind chills to watch the Kansas City Chiefs host the Miami Dolphins in the 2024 NFL playoffs. Now, some of them are facing potential amputations as a result of frostbite, according to Fox 4 News. Dr. Megan L. Garcia, a general surgeon at Kansas City's Grossman Burn Center, told Fox 4 this week that 70% of the medical center's patients referred for frostbite injuries suffered at the January wild-card game are "being advised to schedule amputations." This comes months after Garcia indicated she'd already seen dozens of frostbitten patients as a result of the game's conditions. The Jan. 13 matchup kicked off with a -4 degree temperature and -27 degree wind chills at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, making the contest the fourth-coldest ever recorded in NFL history, and the coldest in Chiefs history. Immediately following the game, reports indicated at least 10 fans had been hospitalized with either frostbite or hypothermia. …I know the two coldest games Dallas at Green Bay- December 31, 1967 (- 15F degrees/wind chill -36F degrees) San Diego at Cincinnati- January 10, 1982 (-9F degrees/wind chill -59F degrees) I’m as big a football fan as anyone but no...not even if I had tickets for a Bears game at Soldier Field...well, if I had tickets to a certain game played on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in Ann Arbor, MI than yes, I would go...layered up. Given the two weeks between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, I could see rescheduling those...although they did reschedule a game in the earlier rounds of the NFL playoffs round this past year. Is there any event that you can think of where you would brave some inclement weather, hot, cold, muggy, etc.? 3. This coming Sunday is the Academy Awards. The nominees for Best Picture are: American Fiction [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/8/2228254/-Top-Comments-Open-Thread?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/