SAN DIEGO—July is typically a make-or-break month for many of this West Coast city’s restaurants, bars and trinket shops. Just as the nation’s retailers look to turn a profit for the year on Black Friday, small businesses here pin their livelihood on conventions, whose thousands of attendees filter out into the city to spend money.
Not this year. Comic-Con International: San Diego—an event featuring sci-fi actors, authors and other celebrities that typically draws more than 100,000 visitors—was held virtually last weekend.
While much of the U.S. economy has reopened and is gaining steam, industries that cater to large, in-person gatherings are only slowly ramping up—a main reason the economic recovery remains uneven.
In California, where restrictions on large gatherings were lifted in June, the San Diego Convention Center will host its first post-pandemic, in-person gathering Aug. 1. The center is booked from August through the end of the year, but in-person attendance at the conventions is expected to be far below what the city’s conventions typically draw. That means potentially hundreds of millions fewer dollars flowing into the local economy than before the pandemic, hurting businesses big and small—airlines, hotels, restaurants, Uber drivers, florists.
While Las Vegas turned a corner in June when its convention center reopened to giant in-person industry events, California’s restrictions were lifted too late for many organizers to conduct the months of planning needed to host them in San Diego in July. Some industry groups had tentatively booked the convention center but postponed the events until later this year or canceled in favor of booking events in other states that had already eased restrictions. California Gov. Gavin Newsom detailed in April which restrictions would be lifted by this summer, with strict restrictions continuing until June 15.
