Looking for a place to rest in between practice helicopter instrument approaches last month, I stumbled on Mike’s Runway Diner at the Auburn/Lewiston Airport (Maine). From the restaurant’s Facebook page….
We are a family owned business that offers Americana comfort food at a reasonable price. Our portions are huge and everything is prepared fresh and you can sit along the runway and watch the planes. (318 Likes; 334 followers; 230 check-ins)
March 8, 2020: Happy Sunday. Come out and enjoy this great day at Mike’s Runway Diner. Sit along side the runway and watch the Planes take off and land while enjoying a great meal.
March 18, 2020: As many of you have heard we had to close the Restaurant due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We will be open tomorrow Thursday from 7am to 11am for to go orders only. We will keep the page updated as to when restaurants can open again. Remember to isolate and wash your hands
April 17, 2020: Mike and I are still unable to get certain provisions to run the restaurant. We will keep every one updated on when we will be able to open back up. Stay safe and indoors.
May 14, 2020: Good morning. As of now Mike’s Runway Diner is on track for opening at the beginning of June. We will keep our page updated . Thank you for all the support we have received during the closure. Mike and I look forward to seeing our favorite people (our customers). See you soon 🙂 Mike and Heather
July 5, 2020: We are still working on trying to open back up. Waiting on the restrictions to lift. We look forward to seeing everyone again soon. Mike and Heather
July 29, 2020: Well the time has come to say good by. Corona got the best of our restaurant and we were not able to move forward. Mike and I thank everyone for your business, love and support. We will cherish everyone and the memories for ever. Thank you and we will miss you all. Mike and Heather
(Minor corrections made to the above for readability.)
A partial screenshot:
Related:
- “An Analysis of the Employment Patterns of Somali Immigrants to Lewiston from 2001 through 2006” (Maine Department of Labor): “Of the 1,118 working-age Somali immigrants, 552 had employment at some point during their time in Maine. This is an overall employment rate of 49 percent.”
Obama always said if you like your small business you can keep your small business!
It’s depressing that those people are still blaming a mild respiratory illness for destroying their business instead of the power-mad tyrants who are actually guilty.
Or themselves. If everyone stayed open most everyone would still be in business. You cuck, you die. Maybe if they bucked the ‘mandates’ the state would have crushed them, maybe, but at least then it wouldn’t be their fault and they would have fallen in honor.
@GB It might be “cucking” to cower in fear of being called names or something, but when the government sends out people with guns and Qualified Immunity to punish the disobedient, like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWk9r24I4QA
And government prefers to attack mild-mannered small business owners and pastors than actual violent criminals, for obvious reasons.
Waah the government will get me. So what. If they got tossed in jail for a night and had their businesses destroyed by force then they would be a year ahead on figuring out what to do next. And if everyone stayed open they wouldn’t be able to close a fraction of businesses. You cuck you lose deservedly so.
Ken – “Mild respiratory illness”? Were the ICU’s filled with Soros paid actors; the ventilators props? I know someone who still hasn’t regained their sense of taste six months on. Based on excess mortality rates, Covid-19 is the #1 cause of death in the US. Over one million dead. With precautions. I’d hate to know what a moderate to serious respiratory illness is like.
Doubtful that Mike’s Runway Dinner patrons were in the risk group of 75+ year olds
The diner was placed by a runway, not buy a nursing home.
Senorpablo: The ventilators weren’t props, but my physician friends say that ventilators killed far more Americans with COVID-19 than were saved by ventilators. In their opinion, the typical patient with severe COVID-19 would have had a better chance of survival if he/she/ze/they never went to the hospital, but stayed home with an oxygen bottle and high-flow cannula.
For April 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge shows that deaths with a COVID-19 tag (could be simply a positive PCR test) were 17,701 out of a total 238,970 deaths nationwide (7.4 percent of the total).
The COVID-19 death rate is irrelevant, though, unless you are capable of doing something about it. Unless you deny science and say that the virus cannot evolve, only those in the deepest bunkers can delay infection.
Sweden isolated the old/vulnerable and did not order any businesses to close. They ended up with a lower rate of excess deaths than the typical EU country (masked and shut), a far lower rate of COVID-19-tagged deaths than here in Maskachusetts, and a lower rate of deaths overall than they had in 2010 (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/01/04/sweden-will-have-a-lower-death-rate-in-2020-than-it-had-in-2010/ ).
My med school professor friends say that it is a completely new idea that humans are capable of defeating a respiratory virus. We pulled this idea out of our collective butts in March 2020. So far there is no better evidence that this war is winnable than when we had the idea that we could win the Vietnam War.
Philg – it’s unfortunate that your medical professional friends don’t also poses time machines so they can go back in time to present their anecdotal evidence. Where were these courageous, hind sight heroes at the beginning of the pandemic?
As for Sweden, why not compare to neighboring Denmark, which is perhaps most similar in terms of society and population density per your previous post? It’s easy to cherry pick places which fared worse than Sweden’s contrarian plan. Or, how about Singapore–your goto for every comparison involving economics, bureaucracy and taxation? One of the lowest Covid death rates in the world. They didn’t follow your prescribed, laissez faire, contrarian policies. Instead, they had strict mask mandates, proactive testing, contact tracing and medical care. They also didn’t elect a moron as president, who’s primary plan was thoughts and prayers, and who made fun of Biden for wearing a mask days before needing to be hospitalized and tended to by a small army of doctors.
SenorP: At the start of coronapanic, the docs and profs whom I’ve been talking about said (1) shutdowns would merely delay the inevitable, (2) masks for the general public would have a minimal effect, (3) hospital care for COVID-19 was unhelpful, just as there is no effective treatment for many other viral infections, and (4) a vaccine was likely 3+ years away given how slow and bureaucratic the FDA is and the unwillingness of companies to do human challenge trials. They also said that they couldn’t go public with these beliefs or they would be “unpersoned” and, if in academia, never receive funding again. (In other words, they were wrong about the speed with which Professor Dr. Donald J. Trump, Ph.D. could get a vaccine out the door.)
(Unclear why these beliefs had become punishable heresy, since Beliefs 1 and 2 were part of standard WHO guidance; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/02/23/who-guidance-on-pandemics-then-and-now/ )
Why compare Sweden to Massachusetts? I live in Massachusetts! At least for another month or two. What countries would be the best comparisons to Sweden? As noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/04/04/coronascientists-are-the-modern-aristotles/ , I would stick with Ireland, Britain, and France since these were the comparison countries picked by the NYT in April 28 and the old-style scientific method says that you’re not supposed to come up with your hypothesis after all data are received. As of right now, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ shows that Sweden has a lower COVID-19 death rate than the UK (“Britain”) and France and a higher death rate than Ireland. I.e., they ended up with a mediocre disease statistic outcome, just as their top public health officials said, in March 2020, that they would. (Remember that they sought a global optimum for quality of life, not to minimize COVID-19-tagged deaths at the cost of, e.g., not educating children.)
Why not compare Sweden to Singapore? Sweden is 25 percent low-skill immigrants and children of low-skill immigrants. There are lots of things that Singapore will be able to do that countries packed with low-skill residents (e.g., the United States) won’t be able to do. Separately, all of Southeast Asia had a minimal problem with COVID-19 during Wave #1. Does that mean we should look to Laos (3 deaths total; see https://covid19.who.int/ ) for the secrets of public health?
(If it were easy to “Do X as well as Singapore” we could just raise our per capita GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, up from $62,530 to Singapore’s $97,341. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-per-capita/country-comparison )
Philg – isn’t it complete speculation to think that if Massachusetts had done the Sweden plan, they would’ve had similar outcomes? You’re basically taking the position that it couldn’t have been any worse, might as well live free, which seems nonsensical to me. How do you know it wouldn’t have been 2x worse? You don’t. It’s wishful thinking.
SenorP: If Maskachusetts had lived 95 percent free like the Swedes (open unmasked schools, nursing homes isolated) or 80 percent free like the Floridians (100 percent open schools, by governor’s order, but usually with masks), we would have suffered 2X the death rate and gone from “almost the world’s highest death rate” to “definitely the world’s highest rate if we were our own country”? That is the same logic used by the Flagellants in 1348 and 1349. If we hadn’t whipped ourselves, God would have killed 100 percent of the people in our town instead of only 50 percent.
Via this logic, you can reject 100 percent of the World Health Organization’s science (pre-June 2020, it was “don’t rely on masks for the general population”; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/02/23/who-guidance-on-pandemics-then-and-now/ ) and then assert that whatever you did must have been effective.
The best examples of “wishful thinking” that I have seen are in the Church of Shutdown. Here in Massachusetts, for example, we decided that COVID-19 could never thrive in a place where schools were shut and marijuana and liquor stores were open while the customers of the marijuana and liquor stores were free to meet on Tinder. (we would be #6 in the world on https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ if we were our own country). California decided that it would set its own COVID-19 death rate at a much lower level than Florida’s via paper masks, bandanas, and school shutdowns (adjusted for population over 65, of course, California ended up with a substantially higher rate of COVID-19 deaths than FL).
Realistic thinking, from my point of view, came from Kristi Noem in South Dakota: federal and state governments are not going to be able to protect you against this virus. Infected people wrapped in bandanas or covered in 3-cent surgical masks will still be infectious. So if you don’t want to get COVID-19, you absolutely have to stay outdoors and/or stay home.
You’ve got to stop being a divider and not a uniter! Listen, when people’s small businesses fail because they’re not Apple or Amazon and everything they’ve worked to build falls apart, that’s just part of #InThisTogether during the most unprecedented public health crisis the world has ever succumbed to.
I’d like to make it very clear that public health crisis and an actual illness are two very different things. The former is completely manufactured while later isn’t particularly exceptional by any objective measure.
A lot of restaurants around the general aviation side of airports have vanished in the last 20 years. There just aren’t many people who can do helicopter instrument approaches anymore.
lion2: The typical customer for an airport restaurant is a local family with young children (i.e., not pilots themselves). They come to watch what to them is a show. Airport restaurants seem to be more enduring that the typical restaurant. The one at Plymouth, MA has been around since 1996 under the same management: https://www.planejanesplace.com/about-us/ ; Also since 1996, a big restaurant at a tiny airport in Hampton, NH: https://theairfieldcafe.com/
I can’t figure out when the Nantucket restaurant opened, but it has had the same name since 2011 (see https://yesterdaysisland.com/2011/restaurants/Crosswinds/ )
There have been a couple of ownership/management changes over the decades at https://www.theairportgrille.com/ in New Bedford, MA, but it has remained open (at least when legal for a restaurant to be open).
And in somewhat related news, WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki reveals her most prized possession.
https://i.ibb.co/CPNGm5W/WHITEHOUSE3.jpg
@PhilG:
But how are they managing now? I mean, they have other business[s] to focus on?
I also hope they have some other business, but the honest ones are punished. Dishonest ones thrive, for example the mask business
https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-bavaria-issues-arrest-warrant/a-56989192
or the corona test business:
https://www.dw.com/en/covid-mismanagement-german-government-under-fire/a-57726240
In NYC’s Chinatown it appears as if around a third to a half of the businesses are shuttered — more like abandoned, as if someone put a padlock on the door about a year ago and never came back. You have to wonder if the immigrant Chinese who had the wit and determination to get to America in the first place are hanging around to see what the future brings or have decamped to climes more hospitable to small businesses like Florida or Texas.
Jack: I saw this the other day in Brookline, Maskachusetts (home to an outdoor mask law even after governor’s statewide order was rescinded). Quite a few empty retail shops. A “dispensary” opening soon, however. And I passed a bunch of billboards advertising marijuana. It was as if a Hollywood set designer had been hired to create a future dystopia.
(I’m not opposed to legalized marijuana in our society dedicated to debauchery, but why allow advertising for weed? Why not let potheads find “cannabis” stores via Google? Also, would it make sense to say that marijuana stores have to be in out-of-the-way locations? If you’re walking your kids past the pizza shop should you also have to explain why people need marijuana? (This is not inconsistent with my attitude toward alcohol; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/06/11/reintroduce-prohibition-for-the-u-s/ )
Couldn’t Mike’s Runway Diner tap into some of that multi-trillion Conrona Relief funding and free money? Or maybe they did.
Compare/Contrast: It looks as though O’Brien’s Southern Diner survived the plague, and Hickok45 recently had a nice time there. He was their first customer, as in “The First Customer.”
https://www.facebook.com/OBriens-Southern-Diner-1246524965490400/
https://www.obriensdiner.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/hickok45