One of the most tragic externalities of Covid was that everywhere in the country businesses started aggressively scaling back on their hours.
Walmarts even in small, local factions of the Midwest and the South were always open and it wasn’t rare to have a handful of restaurants or coffee shops that stayed open throughout the night either. Bars would even just state their hours were from 11am - late instead of a distinct hour and 3am or 4am closings were also more commonly anticipated.
Now, Walmarts can close as early as 9pm and even cities like Vegas find it nearly impossible to do anything after midnight or 1am on even a Friday or Saturday night unless your gambling.
Here, even cocktail lounges and bars don’t stay open past midnight most of the time and prior to covid you could literally get an offstrip haircut at 4 in the morning but now even getting a bite to eat or going to a bar is an impossibility.
Out of all the things that were taken from us in the aftermath of covid, this is one of the ones that makes me most angry. It feels like a particular albeit discrete freedom or liberty has been stripped fro me that I will never get back all for the sake of “margins.”