How a typical employer in fitness, recreation, arts, entertainment and sports operates
An employer in this industry sells presence. Its product is a room full of people exercising, watching, playing, riding, bowling or listening, and every one of its eleven functions is performed at a place, before a crowd or a class, on a calendar, with a workforce of part-time instructors, ushers, coaches and operators who live in the metros, ride transit and have children in school. Each of those elements is a subject of the orders catalogued in the layers section below, and each was reached. The facility was closed or capped; the class was capped or prohibited; the performance was cancelled, moved outdoors or seated at a fraction; the season was suspended or played without spectators; the ride, lane and arcade were closed; the food and beverage stand followed the food-service rules; the launch, festival and fair were cancelled by gathering cap; the lifeguard, referee and coach could not be certified, hired or scheduled; the box office refunded a season sold in advance; the workforce was confined, quarantined and placed under airborne-transmission controls; and the member, patron, fan and family base was ordered to stay home. The Notice's own first example of a qualifying order is a list of this industry's facilities.1
FC: facilities, gyms, studios, rinks and pools
The facility is the industry's floor: a gym with a rated occupancy, a studio with a class capacity, a rink with an ice schedule, a pool with lifeguard ratios, locker rooms, showers, saunas, hot tubs and child-care rooms sold as part of a membership. An order that closes the facility by name, caps it at a percentage of its fire-code occupancy or at one person per so many square feet, requires six to fourteen feet between exercisers, closes the locker rooms, showers, saunas and child care, requires reservation-only entry, closes the facility between stated hours, imposes workplace infection-prevention and exposure-control requirements (face coverings while exercising among them) or conditions reopening on an inspection or an attestation changes what the facility does and how many people can do it there. Every State's March 2020 order closed the facility outright; every reopening order in the country imposed at least three of those conditions; the winter orders of 2020 re-closed or re-capped it in twenty-two States and the District and re-tightened the rules it operated under in nine more; Hawaii re-capped it at fifty percent on August 10, 2021; and New York City, San Francisco, New Orleans and Honolulu barred the unvaccinated from its doors in August and September 2021.2
CL: classes and group activities
Classes, leagues, lessons, camps, clinics and personal training are sold by membership, pack or session and taught in a room to a group. An order that prohibits indoor group fitness classes, caps a class at ten, prohibits organized youth or adult sports, closes summer camps or limits them to stable cohorts of ten or twelve, prohibits contact sports or imposes airborne-transmission controls, face coverings among them, in every class reaches this function directly. Indoor classes were prohibited outright in New York City until March 22, 2021, in Chicago from November 20, 2020, in Michigan from November 18, 2020 to January 16, 2021, in Illinois under Tier 3 and in the District from November 25, 2020 (Mayor's Order 2020-119, Ex. DC-013); classes were capped at ten in Delaware, prohibited outright in Kentucky's gyms with venues limited to twenty-five per room, and capped at one instructor per stable group in dozens of reopening orders.3
PE: performances, theaters, cinemas and live events
Screens, stages and shows sell tickets in advance. A cinema pays film rental of roughly half of box office to the distributor and earns its margin on food and beverage sales; a presenter or promoter sells a fall-spring season or a summer festival and settles with artists, agents and venues after each show; a museum sells timed admissions and memberships. An order that closes theaters and performance venues, prohibits indoor live entertainment, prohibits live performances in restaurants and bars, caps fixed seating at fifteen, twenty, twenty-five or fifty percent or at fifty persons per screen, prohibits food and beverage sales or intermissions, requires six feet between parties, refuses special-event and street-fair permits, cancels the State fair or bars foreign artists from entering the country reaches this function directly. Theaters were closed in every State in March 2020; live performance venues were the last category reopened in most States; movie theaters in New York City did not reopen until March 5, 2021; Washington's indoor performance venues opened only in Healthy Washington Phase 2 in 2021; and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant statute is Congress's own finding that the function was shuttered.4
SP: sports, leagues and tournaments
Teams, tournaments and seasons earn gate, food and beverage sales, sponsorships, media and merchandise on a fixed calendar, and youth and adult leagues earn registration and facility fees on a school-year and summer calendar. An order that suspends organized sports, prohibits games, scrimmages and tournaments, permits practice only, prohibits contact sports, prohibits spectators or caps them at ten, twelve or twenty-five percent of fixed seating, requires an approved event plan for any competition above a stated size, imposes airborne-transmission controls on every athlete, suspends interscholastic seasons, closes school gymnasiums and fields to outside leagues, requires vaccination of participants in designated extracurricular sports or quarantines an exposed team for ten to fourteen days reaches this function in terms. Every professional, collegiate, scholastic and youth season in the country stopped in March 2020; professional sports resumed in 2020 only "without spectators" under orders such as Texas Executive Order GA-23; Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, Louisiana and Texas capped spectators at ten to twenty-five percent through the winter; North Dakota suspended all youth and adult sports from November 16, 2020; New Jersey suspended indoor practices and competitions from December 5, 2020 through January 2, 2021; Delaware required health-department approval of every tournament and indoor sport until July 12, 2021; and New York City required vaccination of every participant in its designated extracurricular sports from September 27, 2021.5
AM: amusement, attractions, bowling and arcades
Rides, lanes, games, parties and attractions earn admissions, league fees and food and beverage with summer and school-holiday peaks. Amusement parks, water parks, trampoline parks, bowling centers, arcades, indoor play areas, zoos, aquariums, museums and family entertainment centers were named in the closure orders of March 2020 in nearly every State; California kept amusement parks closed in every Blueprint tier until April 1, 2021; Arizona re-closed water parks and tubing on June 29, 2020; West Virginia re-prohibited fairs, festivals and amusement parks on July 14, 2020 and kept them barred in March 2021; the State fairs of Ohio, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York and many others were cancelled for 2020 by their boards under State orders; New Mexico conditioned entry to its 2021 State Fair on proof of vaccination; and Honolulu's Safe Access O'ahu and New Orleans's August 2021 rules reached indoor attractions, bowling alleys, arcades and indoor amusement by name.6
CN: food, beverage and retail sales
Every venue, gym, rink, bowling center and park sells food, beverage and merchandise at a counter, bar, pro shop or gift shop. Those counters followed the food-service and retail rules of each jurisdiction: closed where the venue was closed; take-out only, seated service only, no bar seating, alcohol cut-offs and closing hours where the venue was open; airborne-transmission controls, face coverings among them, at every counter; and, in New York City and New Orleans, no service to an unvaccinated patron. In Nevada the gaming regulator's notices governed every casino bar, restaurant and showroom, and in Louisiana the Gaming Control Board's Emergency Order No. 27 of August 4, 2021 imposed occupational-health and airborne-transmission controls on every licensed floor, requiring a face covering of every employee and patron.7
MK: marketing and events
Launches, openings, festivals, fan events, sponsor hospitality and trade shows are how the industry sells the next season. Gathering caps of ten to two hundred fifty, venue closures, the refusal of special-event, parade and street-fair permits, mega-event and large-event rules and the entry proclamations that kept foreign tours out of the country reached this function in every quarter. New York City refused every street-event, parade and fair permit from July 7, 2020 into 2021; Savannah barred every gathering above fifty on City property from August 24 to September 23, 2021; Nevada conditioned any face-covering exemption for events of 4,000 or more on proof of vaccination of every attendee from August 16, 2021; and California's mega-event rule governed every indoor event of 5,000, and from September 20, 2021 of 1,000, in the State.8
HR: hiring and certification
The workforce is certified: lifeguards, trainers, coaches, referees and camp counselors hold certifications renewed in person, in pools and gymnasiums, on fixed schedules; venues and leagues run background checks through public offices; touring companies and teams bring foreign artists and athletes on visas issued at consulates. Every certification course, examination and pool was closed in the spring of 2020; routine visa services were suspended on March 20, 2020; the entry proclamations kept foreign performers, athletes and crews out of the country until November 8, 2021; and from August 2021 the health-worker, State-employee and school-staff vaccination orders of nineteen States removed from the part-time labor pool the athletic trainers, school coaches and municipal recreation staff on whom leagues and camps depend.9
OP: box office, league and studio administration
The box office, the league office and the studio's front desk are offices, and the telework mandates of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, California, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts and the District closed or capped them; the ticketing platforms on which they depend faced refund obligations on every cancellation; and the permit, licensing and special-event offices of every city closed to walk-in service. The administrative function also absorbed the compliance work every order compelled: written protocols, capacity counts, reservation systems, attestation forms, inspection requests, vaccination-verification procedures, signage and record-keeping, each a change in how the office operated that no law required but for the order.10
WF: workforce availability
The workforce is part-time, hourly, young and seasonal, lives in the metros, commutes by transit and has school-age children. Stay-at-home orders confined it; school-closure and remote-learning orders kept parents home; quarantine and isolation orders removed exposed instructors, athletes and staff for ten to fourteen days; the FFCRA leave mandate compelled the employer to pay those absences through December 31, 2020; the conveyance mask order and TSA directives conditioned every commute and every road trip from February 1, 2021; traveler quarantines made every interstate tour or tournament a two-week absence; and the vaccination-or-test orders of 2021 conditioned the employment of every part-time staff member who also worked in a school, a hospital or a State agency.11
CB: the member, patron, fan and family base
The industry's customers are members, ticket-holders, fans and families, each under the orders of the jurisdiction where they lived and travelled. A stay-at-home order on the base is an order limiting travel and group meetings in terms; a gathering cap is an order limiting group meetings; a travel quarantine is an order limiting travel; a school order that closes the gymnasium closes the league. The Notice lists a shelter-in-place proclamation as a qualifying order; the United States has represented that an order addressed to a third party can suspend a business; and the statute says nothing of the source. The interconnected-economy section below applies the rule.12
Revenue lines, seasonality and geography
Revenue is sold in advance and on a calendar. Cinemas live on summer and holiday release slates; performing-arts organizations sell a fall-spring subscription season; spectator sports run fixed league calendars (baseball March through October, football September through February, basketball and hockey October through June); amusement parks, water parks, camps, fairs and festivals run May through September; fitness lives on the January enrollment surge and a continuous class schedule; bowling runs fall-winter leagues. An order that closed a facility for March through June 2020 cancelled a season, not a quarter; the orders that capped it at ten to fifty percent through the winter and spring of 2021 dictated the size of the next one. The industry is concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas, where the local orders were densest, earliest and longest, and in destination markets (Las Vegas, Orlando, Honolulu, New Orleans) where the traveler quarantines and entry proclamations governed the customer base.13
The counterparty map
Landlords and municipal venue authorities: leases, arena and stadium agreements and park permits, under the eviction moratoria, the venue closures of the park districts and convention authorities and the permit refusals catalogued below. Film studios and distributors: release calendars withdrawn as theaters closed by order in every State. Artists, agents, promoters and touring companies: routed across States with different orders, under the travel quarantines of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Hawaii, Alaska, Chicago and others and under the entry proclamations. Professional and collegiate leagues and State interscholastic associations: acting under State orders, from Texas GA-23's "without spectators" to New Jersey Executive Order 149's bar on NJSIAA activity before June 30, 2020. Schools and park districts: the gymnasiums, fields, pools and program buildings of every youth league, camp and swim program, closed by the school closures of 2020, the remote and hybrid orders of 2020-21 and the park-district closures, and governed in 2021-22 by the school masking and quarantine orders. Ticketing platforms: refund obligations on cancellation. Equipment, ride and projection manufacturers and importers: the non-essential manufacturing closures of Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey and the foreign plant and port orders. Food and beverage distributors, insurers, sponsors and payment processors: each under its own State's orders. The health authority that licensed the pool, inspected the kitchen and approved the event plan: the sector regulator. For every one of these classes, the layers section names the orders and the interconnected-economy section treats them as the orders they are.14