The ZOMBIE Recovery

U.S. businesses staggering along on stimulus may collapse before a fresh round arrives

- Shawn Donnan

This was supposed to have been a good year for zombies. At least that’s what Kevin Kriess, who owns the Living Dead Museum & Gift Shop in Evans City, Pa., thought. The business, not far from the cemetery where George Romero filmed the 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, was gearing up for an expansion. Kriess planned to open a second location at a mall a 45-minute drive away, where the sequel Dawn of the Dead was set. “This year was going to be super big for us,” says Kriess, a horror-movie buff turned purveyor of T-shirts, posters, and other memorabilia to obsessed fans of the undead.

Instead, in October, he packed up his ghoulish wares and turned off the lights for the last time in the storefront he’d rented across from a funeral home. With almost 300,000 dead and millions displaced from their jobs, Kriess’s troubles hardly register on the economic damage scale. But his story is representative of the broader experience at the end of a calamitous year. Much of the economy remains in suspended animation—a zombie recovery—which masks how much the crisis has curtailed ambitions and how much depends on a new injection of government aid that has languished for months in a partisan Congress.

Hope is on the horizon in the form of a vaccine. But an economy that seemed over the summer to be roaring back to life is facing a dark winter. In November, the U.S. created just 245,000 jobs. At that pace it would take three and a half years to get employment back to February’s levels. Now, as Covid-19 infections surge to record highs, states are imposing new restrictions.