President Alberto Fernández recently stated in a tone of vindication that “now the complaints I hear from people are because you have to wait two hours to go eat. The hotel and gastronomic sectors are full. It is more joy, more enjoyment…”
We are part of a culture in which leaving our homes to eat in a restaurant is a reason for enjoyment, be it with family, friends, with whom we share work, or a personal getaway to break the workday; it is also conceived as a favorable place for business and social and political activities. This social practice is, for some minority sectors, a common situation; for others a taste that represents an exceptional output and for the majority of our population an unattainable desire.
Consumption is a characteristic of the times that becomes a disturbance for those who cannot access those resources that the market aggressively proposes.
Of course, not all people can consume in the same way, neither in frequency, quantity, nor quality. This is the typical moment in which one usually opts for short-term consumption and immediate satisfaction that means enjoyment.
This is not the time to project the future due to the degree of economic-financial and political uncertainty. The lack of direction and political project makes the long-term perspective null. Among the impossibilities of accessing credit for a home, buying a car, starting a venture from the private initiative, saving money or traveling to see a relative who lives abroad, are unfeasible alternatives for a large part of the population in the face of instability and economic unpredictability, characterized by tax pressure and extremely high inflation that liquefies wages and affects, in a special way, the most disadvantaged sectors. One piece of information is obvious: with the highest denomination bill you cannot even buy a kilo of meat.
It is true that the hotel and gastronomy sector is going through a better time because it is the holiday months and also because vast sectors of the population went to their homes during the pandemic, which, among other things, left a sense of finiteness that remains installed in the social awareness.
In the search for a better quality of life, the cheapest consumption is food with the forms that gastronomy proposes. Most opt for food at their socioeconomic level, not for food purposes, but as an outlet or distraction from other leisure and entertainment alternatives that are more expensive and inaccessible.
Hence, this sector has always represented one of the main generating axes of the economic movement. We cannot ignore the fact that we must also set foot in those hotels and restaurants that lost a lot of money during the pandemic and we still cannot recover it. Some of these are no longer around and have been the means and main source of income for their owners and workers for years.
As a result of the pandemic, according to the institution’s records, more than 2,000 establishments were closed, of which only 400 reopened; In addition, 25,000 jobs were eliminated and informality grew due to the high tax pressure.
In which you have to wait to occupy a table, as the President says, are the fifty restaurants in the most affluent neighborhoods of the City.
Inevitably, I ask: what is the President boasting about? What do you intend to capitalize on politically with this statement? Not only does he have no real reasons because our sector has not yet recovered from the calamitous administration of the pandemic, much less can he strut with “those who go out to eat” when we have a large part of our people who follow, as the tango says , with the cream against the glass.
*General Secretary Uthgra CABA.
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