Businesses have been asked to take on a number of roles during the pandemic. In 2020 BC, or before COVID, your average business worked hard to provide a good or service that would appeal to as many customers as they could in hopes that those same customers would return to buy even more items. Now that has been turned on its ear.
Once COVID entered our lexicon businesses had to worry about social distance and sanitization. They had to worry about square footage and aisle directions. They even had to worry about number of people that were allowed to enter an establishment at any given time. Now they are even being told that they have to enforce mask orders coming from government.
We have all seen the effects of these constraints on business. Look around your local thoroughfares in your town. Odds are that the number of shuttered businesses have increased several fold in the last eight months. Just here in Brunswick, we have seen long time businesses close up or take a hiatus through the winter due to restrictions in place. Whether some of those businesses ever reopen is anyone’s guess.
In this time of uncertainty and angst comes news this week of a morale and welfare booster from the most unlikely of places, Washington DC. It was reported earlier this week that Maine’s own Sen. Angus King, the “Independent” from Brunswick, had penned a letter to the heads of America’s most-watched streaming services. In the letter the good senator called upon these companies to open their services and content, free of charge, to all non-subscribers for an undetermined amount of time around the holidays.
These services should, as the letter points out, “…remove any cost considerations from use of your services…as a public service to who are seeking to remain safe and indoors this holiday season, as opposed to the risks involved as the nation sees a dramatic surge in pandemic cases.” The letter goes on to state that the goal is to get as many Americans as possible to remain at home during the holidays and that those Americans need a reason to stay at home.
It is not in dispute that each one of the companies that the senator wrote too is worth many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Can they sustain the loss of revenue for a service or services that other Americans are paying for? Probably. However, why should these companies be put into a situation where they must either be bullied by one of the most powerful people in the country or looked at as cheapskates who do not care about people getting sick? Why did it come to this at this time?
The cumulative cost of a subscription to each of these streaming services is less than $70 per month as recently reported by WSCH TV. $70 is not a small sum to most Mainers and considering that there are costs for internet access and other incidentals and the true cost can be well over $100 or $200 per month. That $70 is supposed to make us forget that some of us or our friends and family have lost their jobs or been laid off.
While being able to binge-watch the entire catalog of the Fast and Furious movies or every season of the Real Housewives of Wherever and everything produced by Disney sounds like a great way to spend a few days, but it is only meant to occupy our minds until the holidays are over. As that is what the senator asked the companies to do.
Instead of looking outside of the DC bubble to give citizens a small token of goodwill, perhaps the Senator could have used some of his influence to work with the other 534 members of Congress. The Senator could bring those elected officials together to give back some of the money that is handed over in payroll taxes or withholding payments. You know the ones. They are taken out of all of our paychecks?
In most cases, those amounts of money would far exceed the cost of the monthly subscription that the streaming services would be losing out on. Americans, who have been squeezed from all angles in the past year, could decide for themselves how to use that extra money in their paychecks or Social Security payments. Maybe they would end up paying for the streaming services, maybe they would find something more enticing to spend their money on in order to occupy their mind and time during this long winter.
Instead of relying upon one of the streaming services to demonstrate how much empathy they have perhaps the senator can work with his colleagues to demonstrate how much empathy they have for the average American. Then again, it is far easier to write a letter from a desk in DC.
Jonathan Crimmins can be reached at j_crimmins@hotmail.com.
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