It’s time to (carefully) reopen our economy

This past weekend, something broke in my house that needed fixing.

Sunday, I decided to venture out into the vast unknown hellscape now known as “reality” to one of our illustrious essential businesses — a home improvement store — in order to acquire the necessary handful of items that I needed to repair said broken thing.

When I arrived, I was more than a little taken aback when I found a full parking lot. No sign, really, of anything abnormal.

As I walked in, my impression of an unchanged status quo was strengthened. People walked the aisles without much trouble. To my left, a man who was buying so much wood that I was fairly certain he was using his quarantine time to build a new house from scratch. To my right, a woman with at least eight gallons of paint, as well as brushes and rollers.

As I walked to the middle of the store to get my needed item, I saw people picking out screws, looking at patio furniture, looking at drywall, and studying new hardwood floor samples with great interest.

In other words, it looked like it always did in the store.

As I was going through checkout, I was approached by one of the employees — I’m going to call him Chet, in order to protect his identity. I asked him the standard greeting we are now obligated to say to one another on the rare occasions we interact with other human beings: “So, how you holding up through all this?”

Chet said he was fine, but he was let go from his second job so he wasn’t quite sure how he would be able to make ends meet for the foreseeable future. Luckily for him, he said, he was able to still work at the big box store, so he was doing better than a lot of his friends. He gave me an “elbow high five” and left me to my social isolation.

My newly-made friend is indeed fortunate that the store was deemed an essential business. I can only assume that designation was made because the government believes that tools and materials in a store like that are potentially necessary in case a pipe bursts in your house, your water heater explodes, or your basement floods.

Yet nearly everyone shopping in that “essential” store Sunday was there for “non-essential” reasons. Chet had also told me that he thought business might have been up, if anything.

That’s probably because of a demand shift, honestly. With large chain stores open and local flooring and interior stores like the Paul White Company in Portland closed, people who want to buy flooring are simply going to the chain stores instead of where they might have gone before.

Yet somehow, despite these scofflaws making their non-essential trips to look at flooring, Maine has managed to respond effectively to the threat of coronavirus, and has unquestionably “flattened the curve.”

What we’ve done has clearly worked, and that’s great. Our actions have stopped the health care system from being overwhelmed.

But our actions have also, for no logical reason that I can arrive at, resulted in the large open-air park next to my house being barricaded, while big box stores remain open. 

They’ve also resulted in a crashing economy, unemployment could be approaching 20 percent, and a massive spike in mental health challenges, with a 34 percent growth in the prescription of antidepressants.

No one is suggesting that we flip a switch from the restrictions we have been living with “back to normal.” But without question, it is time to gently begin to try to reopen our society. Deliberately. Intelligently. With care. And with a whole hell of a lot more common sense than the counterintuitive ways we decided who was essential and who was not. It’s time.

Matthew Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.