The nearly $218 billion in economic stimulus checks sent out by the government during the pandemic—to more than 150 million American households—had a much different purpose than prior federal giveaways.
Prior recessions in 2001 and 2008 saw the government mail checks to households to spur consumer spending, and to fuel an economic rebound. The latest round of checks, by contrast, was more about paying the rent, and putting food on the table.
Or, as the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the “current program is more about helping a family keep buying groceries, while the others were more about prompting it to splurge and buy a new TV.”
Not everyone got the memo. Vizio CEO William Wang tells the Business Journal that when stimulus checks started arriving the week of April 15, TV sales at his Irvine firm reached “Black Friday levels with 250,000 units sold in a week nationwide.”
A good week of sales for the smart TV maker this time of year would be a figure closer to 100,000 units, said Wang, one of about 20 returning entries to this week’s COVID-19-focused OC 50 Special Report, starting on page 25.
Not all of Vizio’s sales were for stuck-at-home Netflix bingers, Wang said, noting smaller-sized TVs were some of the company’s best sellers. It suggests many of the purchases were for stay-at-home workers and students looking for a better screen to conduct Zoom meetings, he said.
Newport Beach’s Lido House appears to be OC’s staycation center. The 130-room boutique hotel reports full occupancy both for the Memorial Day weekend and the upcoming weekend, said Bob Olson, the 2-year-old property’s developer.
“We are catering to the staycation local people, but also L.A., Inland Empire, Nevada and Arizona,” he said last Thursday. “We’ve opened our pool and are hoping to get the OK to open our rooftop—we expect that to open with our restaurant for next weekend.”
“People are loving the pool experience,” Olson said. “We are practicing social distancing and it’s working well.”
Once again, a national media outlet has failed to see OC through the Los Angeles smog, says our Rick Reiff. His report:
A story in last week’s WSJ, headlined, “Coronavirus Hits Southern California Harder Than Northern Counties,” described the pandemic’s impact as “a tale of two cities.”
The San Francisco Bay Area, plus Sacramento, have a quarter of the state’s population but only 16% of its COVID-19 cases and 14% of the deaths, while “the Southern California region dominated by Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to the north and San Diego to the south” has a little over half the state’s population but three-quarters of the cases.
The story cited SoCal’s slower (by three days) lockdown, more nursing homes and more low-income minority residents for the disparity. It suggested that the differences could mean that business restrictions will be eased sooner for the north than the south, enabling that region to more quickly recover economically.
There was no mention of Orange County.
Intentional or not, the omission prevented an inconvenient fact from gumming up the story: OC is 8% of the state population but has only 5% of its COVID-19 cases and just 3% of the deaths—considerably below the state average and even below the Bay Area numbers.
