Goddamnit, Cafe El Dorado

People lining up for breakfast at Cafe El Dorado // photo by Joe Davidson of SacBee

In a more rural part of California where the Chinese Communist Party Virus is not as much of a concern for spread, Cafe El Dorado has opened back up for full scale business. The owners were hurting. Their employees were hurting. And as I've posted before, I think the shelter in place should be lifted. I also fully support their civil disobedience in opening. They legally have that right (the First Amendment unambiguously states the right to "peaceably assemble" and they should have that right.

But goddamnit. Do it responsibly, will you?

Things like this

“The next guy who tells me sheltering ... works, I’ll punch him in the face,” said one middle-aged man, balling up his fists.

And like this

“Well worth the wait!” one customer said upon exiting the eatery, followed by another who chanted, “USA! USA! USA!”

And like this

The quaint restaurant serves breakfast and lunch and only seats about 25 people. Nearly 100 people made their way through for the diner's reopening. Baldridge said social distancing is just not possible.

 ...make it really hard for me to support you and your customers. And I really do want to support you. But the people acting like violent assholes with a weird beetle-minded patriotic bent in a situation that has nothing to do with patriotism makes it difficult. And be responsible, damnit. No, it's not impossible to socially distance. You can assign sparser seating and request the line to be more spread out or give numbers to people so they don't have to stand in line next to each other.

I had a delicious takeout lunch last Saturday at Nyonya Cafe in Pleasanton. They encourage people to phone in their order and they take the food out to the cars so people don't congregate in a small space. That is doing it responsibly. And my mouth is watering just thinking about the laksa noodles with rendang beef.

I do think the vast majority of businesses that are open are doing it responsibly. When I go to Whole Foods, they sanitize the carts and baskets for their customers before going inside. When I went to Total Wine, they encourage everyone to be six feet from everyone else and installed plexiglass barriers between the customers and cashiers. Lowe's restricted the number of people inside the store and asked everyone in line to get in to stand six feet or more apart.

And while it's easy for people to blame the business and its owners, like the two assholes on the opposite aisle that called the business to tell them they're killing people (really?), if we take a step back and look at the situation as a whole, we find that the government regulation would inevitably lead to this, particularly in a culture with rebellious individualism.

The shelter in place laws are putting great strain on people and their ability to survive ($1200 per person over 2.5 months of shutdown isn't going to do jack in California). It is pretty much a certainty that some people are going to decide to break the order out of sheer desperation and customers yearning for a sense of normalcy will be more than willing to patronize. What happens then? Due to shelter in place, the supply of such businesses are going to be severely restrained when it first happens. So everyone is going to crowd into the one restaurant that is open, creating a less than safe situation. If the orders were not in place, more people would be open and the customer base would be more distributed among the different restaurants, creating less crowding and greater ease to socially distance.

 Thankfully, the county Sheriff's Department has no plans to issue a citation to the cafe.

The government inherently does not have the capability, tools, or resources to accurately gauge when every single business or industry should open back up and how. Especially not the state which has regions as dense as San Francisco and as rural as, well, El Dorado County. Only the free market has the resources and proper continual information input to do this.

Maybe we should allow its participants to do so.