There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a difficult time around the world. The global outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has meant that no country or region has been immune to its adverse economic and social impacts. Small and local businesses have also been part of this major crisis, regardless of their size, funding, or location. However, the crisis has been controlled in different ways around the world, but now after almost one and a half years, countries know how to tackle the circumstances of pandemic and how to make the situation the “New Normal” for their businesses and economies. Below are some major cities discussed and the impact of the pandemic on their local businesses and how they managed them to make worthy.
One of the major cities around the world is Dubai. Dubai, which has one of the non-oil-dependent and diversified economies in the Gulf, mainly relies on the sectors like entertainment, tourism, hospitality, logistics and retails. The pandemic affected every industry and especially the tourism industry. Its hotels and restaurants are acclaimed internationally, but due to this COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown conditions, half of the hotels and restaurants have been closed during the time of hard lockdown when COVID-19 was at its peak. But after that time, they managed to reopen their international flights and it was one of the few destinations opened to international travelers. Tourists said they feel safer and relaxed in this pandemic situation that’s why they choose to come to this city.
When we look at the stats of the food and beverage sector of Dubai during the pandemic, we have seen significant growth in their online businesses and delivery portals. Most of these businesses moved their work from a physical to a completely digital world to promote safety and best practices and to minimize the impact of COVID-19. Due to this, retail is the automatically gets benefiting sector of Dubai during the pandemic situation as food and beverage are being bought by consumers in bulk quantity.
On the other hand, cleaning service sector has seen a huge demand in their services as the people want more hygienic, sanitized, and clean places, just to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus. Some, like CleaningCompany.ae providing home cleaning services revealed that their disinfection services have increased a hundredfold due to the COVID-19 because people want more healthy places to live in.
During the COVID-19 situation, the pandemic also has affected London and its local businesses. London was hit hardest by the coronavirus epidemic with a sharp slowdown in every aspect of city life and high mortality rates. A survey done by the Greater London Authority showed that tourists and cultural economies have been impacted. But on a positive note, they reported that more than 70% of businesses still able to continue their works and are financially stable, which is backed by the best strategies by the government.
However, all cafes, pubs, and restaurants were closed during the major lockdown. Meanwhile, this entire sector came to a complete halt for a specific time only. Some of the hotels and restaurants were remained opened but only for takeaways and home deliveries which eventually led their businesses to some financial crises.
To help the restaurant industry, the UK government implemented a major initiative in August 2020: the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. According to The Barbary this helped the restaurants, pubs, and cafes to increase the number of customers who came for dinners, and ultimately their revenues went high. On the other hand, e-commerce sales remained high throughout the pandemic, as consumers continued to do online shopping. For them, this is also a challenge to digitalize their businesses to satisfy the maximum number of customers, and most of the businesses have successfully implemented this strategy and now overcoming most of the challenges of the pandemic.
London’s health care sector was hit harder by the virus as compared to the rest of the country. There was a big challenge to redesign services like treatment of COVID-19 patients, creating more space for them in hospitals, increasing the resources in hospitals, redeployment of existing staff, postponing planned treatments, shifting appointments online, etc. and the government successfully have done a lot of things which turned the situation into a better one.
New York is one of the world’s top business and tourist traveler destinations, but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted tourism in this city. Tourists spend only $13 billion in 2020, a 73% decline from the previous year.
At the same time, this pandemic has affected the retail sector. Some retailers that have online businesses are experiencing high growth while other large physical retail segments facing falling revenues, but after few months of the pandemic, they also come to the digital world which makes them successful in their businesses as well. Due to the increase in demand for food and beverage goods, their businesses earned good revenues but decreased for other goods such as clothing.
New York’s health care sector is not far behind the challenges of the pandemic. The challenges were to create more space for COVID-19 patients and construction of new hospitals, payment of overtime shifts to employees, shortage of supply, etc which was not easy to tackle by the government but they have done a good job to control the entire situation. To control the entire pandemic situation, lockdown and social distancing were maintained by every country, as a result, the number of COVID-19 patients decreased but resulting in bankruptcies, more domestic abuse, hardships, and unemployment which ultimately increased the pressure on local business owners.
Every economy has faced many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic; each country has tackled these challenges differently, and most of them remained successful in this and they continue to address them because the pandemic situation is not over yet.
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