April 18, 2021
Sipping a strong drink outside with friends, jazz music in the air, you could almost forget the pandemic except for masks dangling around everyone’s chins.
Telegraph street in downtown Oakland, California has been closed to auto traffic through a program called flex streets, allowing watering holes like Bar Shiru to set up their tables in the avenue for socially-distanced service. To limit menus, credit cards, or cash from passing back and forth between customers and servers, ordering and payment is done on customers’ own mobile phones, enabled by QR codes. Even the servers have a different glow: In the Covid era, they are “essential workers,” with early vaccine eligibility. The idea of supporting their places of employment has an added tinge of moral righteousness.