December began as a month of joy for Yahya al-Batran and his wife, Nora, when they welcomed twin sons into the world: Jomaa and Ali.

“They were small, sweet, and beautiful,” Mr. Batran recalls.

The month ended in tragedy. Three weeks later, they buried Jomaa, who died from hypothermia Dec. 29 in their makeshift tent on the Deir al-Balah coast, in central Gaza. His twin, Ali, is fighting for his life in the intensive care unit.

“I saw them dying. I cried; I wept. I felt helpless and hopeless,” Ms. Batran says while waiting Sunday for Ali to recover at the ICU at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. “I am so tired.”

After escaping an Israeli siege and shelling in northern Gaza, the family was felled by an unexpected danger: the cold.

“Imagine watching your child die in front of you and feeling utterly powerless,” says Mr. Batran from his tent in western Deir al-Balah. “What can I do? Cold is death.”

For tens of thousands of displaced Gaza Palestinians living in flimsy, temporary shelters, it has been a winter of sorrow and hardship.

Their deteriorating makeshift tents – patchworks of blankets, clothes, cardboard, and whatever materials displaced families can find – are woefully inadequate to confront the winter’s rains and temperatures below 46 degrees Fahrenheit at night.

Water seeps in from above and below. Strong winds have uprooted hundreds of tents on the coast, while surging waves and rain have flooded coastline camps, leaving families huddling under the open sky.

A fight for survival

With the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people displaced multiple times by 15 months of Hamas’ war with Israel, families have inadequate clothing and illness is spreading.

Humanitarian groups warn they are struggling to bring winter clothes and shelters into the Gaza Strip due to Israeli restrictions.

Winter here has become a fight for survival, and death, residents say, is stalking tent camps.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Hadeel al-Kafarna, who has been living in a tent since the start of the war, holds her 6-week-old son, Yousuf, in her arms in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Jan. 5, 2025. “Most of the time, we huddle together” for warmth, she says.

Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported the death of seven infants and one adult from hypothermia in the past three weeks. Doctors Without Borders warns it expects more infants to be affected by hypothermia in the days ahead.

In a statement Saturday, UNRWA, the United Nations’ relief agency for Palestinians, said, “Babies and newborns in the Gaza Strip are dying from hypothermia because of the cold winter weather and lack of shelter, as supplies which would protect them have been stuck in the region for months waiting for approval from the Israeli authorities to get into Gaza.”

“These deaths were preventable, had the items required to protect these children been accessible to their families,” the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday.

Widespread malnutrition after a year of dwindling food supplies is another factor making this winter deadly.

“Being malnourished and exposed to the cold for extended periods increases the risk of various health conditions, particularly in children and other vulnerable communities,” says Dr. Abdulaziz Nahhal, a pediatrician at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza.

“Hypothermia and malnutrition can severely impact mental health, as well as the functioning of the heart, lungs, and digestive system,” he adds.

Half the population in Gaza is under the age of 18.

“Will the rain not enter the tent?”

Facing the pounding winter waves of Deir al-Balah beach, Hadeel al-Kafarna and her husband, Nidal, work to fortify their leaking tent for their five children, ages 6 weeks to 9 years.

Mr. Kafarna grabs a secondhand gray blanket, its edges frayed, and an empty flour sack, to patch the roof.

“It is pointless,” he mutters in frustration, pointing to the water dripping inside, like icy needles. “Will the rain not enter the tent? It will.”

Ms. Kafarna digs through their belongings and hands her husband some clothes to stuff into the gaps between the tent’s wooden supports. “Here,” she says. “It is better than nothing.”

Ghada Abdulfattah

Nidal al-Kafarna works on the leaking makeshift tent where he, his wife, and their five children live in Deir al-Balah, Jan. 5, 2025.

Despite their efforts, the couple can still feel the chill clinging to their children.

“Most of the time, we huddle together,” Ms. Kafarna says. “I am still afraid for my infant son, Yousuf. He is just 43 days old.”

In the most recent rain, days ago, it was too cold to lie down.

“My husband and I stayed up all night standing,” she recalls. “We could not sleep. It was too cold to stay in the tent. I kept holding Yousuf all night.”

An exorbitant cost for a used undershirt

The war economy is also compounding the winter crisis.

Amid the continuing Israeli siege, the prices for basic necessities like winter clothing and food have skyrocketed, sometimes tenfold.

The cost of a 24-square-meter tarpaulin has risen to between $110 and $170, while nylon sheets sell for $2.70 to $8.30 per square meter depending on the type.

“Even secondhand clothes are really expensive. A man asked me for 30 shekels [$8.30] for an undershirt, which is too expensive. I decided not to buy anything,” Ms. Kafarna says.

Their children have persistent coughs and other symptoms, but all the parents can do is huddle for warmth.

“We cannot light a fire at night,” Ms. Kafarna explains, her breath visible in the frigid tent. “There is no firewood, and the tent is made of wood and nylon; it could burn easily. A fire might ignite everything.”

Nearby, Fathiyya al-Banna rails against the cold in her own makeshift tent. Beside her is her husband, Hasan Mahmoud al-Banna. The older couple’s hardships are compounded by a lack of resources and Ms. Banna’s battle with an aggressive illness.

“My husband and I shake a lot during the night,” she says. “We’ve been through rough days, but we have never seen something like this before.”

In yet another flimsy tent, Niveen, who withholds her last name, lives with a son and four daughters – the youngest is 11 – and a grandson. Their journey over the course of the war has taken them from northern Gaza to Rafah, in the south, and finally to Deir al-Balah.

As the winter chill envelops them, Niveen and her 18-year-old son sew and patch their tent.

The family has placed seashells on the ground, an attempt to create a dry layer above the porous sand.

The coldest days of Gaza’s winter are expected to last until Jan. 31. Until then, without a heating source or winter clothes, Niveen encourages her children to rub their feet together to stay warm.

Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.

Hurricanes, people here say, are like unicorns. Each has its own personality, its own legacy.

Ian, which barreled onto shore in September 2022, was about wind; ferocious gusts that blew apart houses and snapped the tops off oak trees and prompted residents of this working-class city to rally around a new slogan: #EnglewoodStrong.

Last fall, Helene brought flooding rains as it traveled up the coast, pushing ocean water into Tampa Bay and the neighborhoods of St. Petersburg, about an hour’s drive north and a world away from this former fishing village.

But it was the next storm, Milton, with its surge that spilled over roads and houses, carrying away belongings and leaving soggy floor joists and ruined drywall, that many here worry could change their community for good.

This is not because repeated storms make people want to leave Englewood, population around 20,000. Even with the water damage and the mold and the recognition that the wealthiest part of town is on a barrier island that should never be expected to stay put, many in Englewood still see their city as a gem; an Old Florida holdout in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.

But the finances of insurance and disaster recovery after Milton are making it hard for many to imagine how they will keep their homes – and how they will continue to stave off the developers that have bought, built, and sold much of the Gulf of Mexico coastline.

It is an inflection point that researchers worry will be repeated across the country, as flooding and other natural disasters increase with a warming climate. A slew of studies show that these events tend to amplify housing disparity and income inequality. A Brookings Institution 2023 report documented the rent increases that accompany natural disasters – as much as 12%, researchers found, for communities with multiple disaster events between 2000 and 2020.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Christmas decorations stand outside Gene Jeffers’ severely-damaged home, and the trailer he currently lives in, after last fall's hurricanes Helene and Milton, Dec. 8, 2024, in Englewood, Florida. His decorations cheer up the neighborhood.

Also last year, researchers from the University of San Diego, in California, and the nonprofit group Resources for the Future published an article in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that detailed how wealthier homeowners tended to buy up property in Florida communities recovering from hurricanes, creating lasting demographic changes.

Many housing advocates point out that federal disaster relief is slow to arrive, when it trickles down to homeowners at all. And policies created in the name of long-term resilience – flood zone building requirements, for instance – are creating a bifurcated system. On the one hand are people – or private equity firms – with the cash to pay for hugely expensive home upgrades, such as rebuilding on stilts, or who can afford to self-insure and repair their properties. On the other are people like Gene Jeffers, sitting in a lawn chair on his driveway, his ruined house to his right, a vacation camper on loan from Habitat for Humanity South Sarasota County to his left.

“I lost my roof with Ian, my furniture with Helene,” Mr. Jeffers says, still giving the easy smile that has endeared him to his neighbors for decades. “Milton took the house.”

Homeowners face ‘impossible situation’

Much of the national discourse about climate resilience on the U.S. coastlines revolves around how and whether insurance companies or governments should support wealthy homeowners who chose – despite the warnings of climate scientists, who predict stronger storms and higher sea levels – to buy on the water. But cities like Englewood highlight a different reality. It is home to retirees and service-industry workers, living in generational houses and small rental units, on fixed incomes and often paycheck to paycheck. They are tightly bound to their neighbors and the waterways that form the veins of this community.

Mr. Jeffers’ in-laws bought his low-slung green home across the street from Lemon Bay in 1972. He moved in in 1997, after retiring from an Indiana factory job. At that time, Englewood was still mostly a town of mullet fishers and service workers employed by the higher-end resort communities to the north and south.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Gene Jeffers sits near the trailer he is currently living in that was donated by South Sarasota’s Habitat for Humanity after his house was severely damaged by hurricanes Helene and Milton, Dec. 8, 2024, in Englewood, Florida. The nonprofit will also help him with clothing and building materials like two-by-fours and kitchen cabinets.

He expects he’ll be gone within two years. By then, Mr. Jeffers imagines, cash buyers will have scooped up the ruined homes across the street, and his lot is going to be too valuable – and too vulnerable to storms – to keep.

“I love this house, but it don’t love me no more,” he says, and shrugs.

He ticks off the reasons.

He expects the ferocious storms to continue, rebuilding is expensive, and there’s no way he can afford homeowners insurance. He’s checked, and it would cost him nearly $1,000 a month. Taxes have gone up. And when asked about flood insurance, he just laughs. Even if he could afford the thousands each year that it would cost, there’s no way he could bring his home up to code in the way the National Flood Insurance Program requires.

Indeed, something called the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “50% rule” is the talk of the town here. It’s the subject of frustration at municipal meetings. It’s what diners talk about at The Waverly restaurant, whose beachside water view is now blocked by a multiple-story pile of sand, which had washed over this key during the storm and has been collected here.

The rule prohibits repairs or improvements to a structure of more than 50% of its market value – just the structure, not the property – unless it is brought into compliance with flood regulations. In other words, if the damage to a small ranch house worth about $100,000 is more than $50,000, homeowners are not covered unless they pay to bring the home into flood plain building compliance, which in this part of coastal Florida often requires raising the house onto stilts, costing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

This mermaid doll washed up onto Bill Dunson’s land when Hurricane Milton caused a high storm surge and flooded Manasota Key, Dec. 8, 2024, in Englewood, Florida.

The idea behind the policy was to keep federal money from being wasted. But in reality, the rule “places people in an impossible position,” says Zoe Middleton, associate director for Just Climate Resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re forcing change without funding adaptation.”

Mr. Jeffers doesn’t know when he will be able to finish enough repairs to move back inside. The local Habitat for Humanity secured him a trailer after CEO Christina McCauley called up friends at a local business, SWFL Camping Rentals. Now, she’s helping him find construction materials. He needs everything: two-by-fours, cabinets, drywall.

Supporting people through disaster recovery is not directly her organization’s mission, Ms. McCauley acknowledges, but it is what neighbors do.

In the meantime, Mr. Jeffers put up the Christmas decorations that his neighbors expect, stringing some 5,000 lights around inflatable snowmen and reindeer. Another 10,000 lights were ruined by the storm.

“I’ve got to spread the joy,” he says.

Storms usher in stark questions

In the days and weeks after Milton, the #EnglewoodStrong hashtag started populating again online. The Chamber of Commerce fundraised for local businesses. Neighbors reached out to help clear debris from homes. Restaurants that weren’t destroyed held benefits to support other restaurants’ workers.

Pam Brobst has lived in Englewood for 45 years, ever since she moved here with her late husband, whose father was a mullet fisher. She loves this community – the way people gather at beach establishments to listen to live music, even when it isn’t very good; that neighbors know each others’ names and phone numbers; and how the feral cats come to her door because they know she will feed them.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Pam Brobst shows how close the water from Hurricane Milton's storm surge came to the home she rents, Dec. 8, 2024, in Englewood, Florida. Her home wasn’t severely damaged, but her yard was filled with debris.

When Milton came, she piled everything in her home on cabinets and tables, put plastic coverings on her bed and sandbags by the door, evacuated, and prayed for the best. When she returned, the debris still left over from Helene was covering her yard – but her home was spared. She was relieved, but teared up thinking about neighbors not as lucky, still living in hotels on FEMA emergency money.

“I don’t know what they’ll do,” she says. “I just don’t know.”

The answer, says Bill Dunson, walking past piles of rubble along Beach Road, where he has been spending half the year for decades, is that people will be forced to leave and the community will change.

The median property value in Englewood, $340,000, is about 20% less than Florida’s average, according to Bankrate.com. But that’s still more than what many people here can afford.

Statistics about cash buyers – the ones Mr. Jeffers believes will buy ruined houses on his street – are hard to pin down for Englewood. The National Association of Realtors says that nearby Fort Myers and Naples have some of the highest percentages of cash buyers in the country – at 58.9% and 52.2%, respectively.

“If you come back in five or 10 years, there will be condos here,” Dr. Dunson says, pointing to a trailer park perched with a view of the glimmering Gulf of Mexico. The homes there were shredded by the storm surge.

For years, he says, the community has protected itself against development, keeping height restrictions in place, voting down offers to buy out modest homes.

“People who are here have jealously guarded their property,” he says. “They haven’t wanted to sell out. Because if you sell out, what are you going to do with the money? Where can you go? They got such a good thing here, right? But now they’re going to be forced to.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Bill Dunson, retired professor emeritus of biology at Penn State, stands in his guesthouse on Manasota Key after storm surge from hurricanes Helene and Milton flooded his neighborhood, Dec. 8, 2024, in Englewood, Florida. Volunteers helped take the cinder-block structure down to the studs. His home, which stands nearby, was also damaged.

This sliver of a neighborhood is on a barrier island called Manasota Key, where Milton’s storm surge was so powerful that it cut a new inlet. Older condo structures are crumpled; trash cans and even dumpsters lie where they were swept. In early December, signs planted along the street offered cleaning services, demolition services, and repairs. Some proclaimed, “We buy houses for cash.”

On Dr. Dunson’s lot, across the street from the Gulf and on the mangrove-thick banks of Lemon Bay, many of his plants were killed by the salt water that flushed over his yard. He isn’t bitter, though. It may be that only plants that can tolerate saltwater incursion will survive here, he says.

He spent years as a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University. He knows he lives on a barrier island. Nature moves, changes, and adapts. And humans must as well.

“If you allow people to live out here, you need to have them build structures that are not damaged so easily,” he says. “Because if the government is going to stand behind and pay for at least some of the damage, it’s got to say that.”

He points out a Norfolk Island pine nearby; a tree that comes from the Western Pacific but is unusually resistant to hurricanes. It may lose limbs during a storm, but rarely topples.

People used to argue over whether this tree was invasive, he says, and whether it should be here. Some people cut them down to keep space for native Florida species. But because of its resilience during storms, it has provided needed habitat for osprey and eagles, who are now competing over its nesting space.

“Decisions in ecology,” he says, “as in politics and religion and everything else, are very rarely black and white.”

Courtesy of Sara Amir

Sara Amir celebrates after her final exams in medical school in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 8, 2024.

The GoFundMe page was Braah Alrashid and Hibatallah Suleiman’s last chance.

It was the end of July 2024, and the two best friends from Sudan had a month to come up with $15,000 to continue medical school in Egypt.

Once, they would have simply asked their families. Ms. Alrashid’s parents, for instance, made a good living as landlords for several rental properties. When she started medical school in Sudan in 2017, her father gave her a car to drive to classes.

But the civil war that broke out in April 2023 turned that easy life upside down. Both Ms. Alrashid’s family and Ms. Suleiman’s had to flee to Egypt. “We lost everything — our homes, our land, our loved ones, and most sorrowfully, our dreams,” the women wrote on their fundraiser page.

More generally, the war has dealt Sudan’s higher education system a catastrophic blow. Universities have been regularly attacked, looted, and even converted into military bases. This has forced many Sudanese university students to abandon their education. But some, like Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman, have found ways to continue it abroad.

Today, thousands of uprooted Sudanese students are enrolled in universities from neighboring Egypt to as far away as Malaysia. But for many, the experience has been bittersweet. These young people welcome the chance to continue studying, but it also often comes at a high price, both financially and emotionally.

Sitting in a Cairo dorm room, Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman were out of choices. Ms. Alrashid hit the publish button on the GoFundMe page, then immediately began tapping restlessly on the reload button, waiting for a donation to appear.

Courtesy of Braah Alrashid

Braah Alrashid attends a medical conference in Khartoum, Sudan, Feb. 25, 2023.

No future in Sudan

Even before the civil war, Sudan’s universities were overcrowded and underfunded. But the war between two factions of Sudan’s military has made things vastly worse. In the first four months of fighting alone, around 100 universities and research centers were damaged or vandalized, according to Sudan’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In the capital, Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, hijacked one university campus and turned it into barracks for its soldiers.

Hussam Ibrahim was six months from finishing his degree in accounting at the University of Science and Applied Studies in Khartoum when the war began. Because other schools in the city were being attacked, the university decided to close its doors.

A few months later, it tried to pick back up by offering classes online. By then, however, both sides in the conflict were using internet blackouts and power outages as weapons of war. So Mr. Ibrahim and his classmates often couldn’t even log on to attend their lectures.

That led him to a painful decision. “I didn’t think I had a future in Sudan,” says Mr. Ibrahim, who decided instead to enroll at a private university in Kampala, Uganda, called Cavendish.

He arranged that transfer on his own, persuading the university to take him on the basis of a few grainy cellphone photos of his exam results, since his shuttered Sudanese university couldn’t provide a transcript.

But many Sudanese students who have gone abroad have done so through partnerships between their universities and institutions in other countries. For instance, in 2023, the Khartoum-based University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST) sent about 300 medical students to the University of Rwanda.

“We chose Rwanda because it has shown the world how to heal their wounds, and this is important for people who are now wounded and in a war, like people from Sudan,” says Mamoun Homeida, chairman of the board of trustees at UMST, in an interview with The New Times Rwanda.

A difficult transition

Still, the transitions have not always been easy. “Back in Sudan, we had lectures in English, but if you didn’t understand something, you could ask the lecturers to explain in Arabic,” says Fatima Abdulrahman, a fourth-year dental student from UMST now studying in Rwanda. “Here, you’re on your own,” she says.

Ms. Abdulrahman has also struggled outside the classroom. She didn’t know which local dishes contained pork, which she is forbidden to eat under Islamic law. And at Rwandan markets, she was shocked when male vendors grabbed her hands to get her attention. “In Sudan, males and females had boundaries, but it’s not like that here,” she says. While she finds the people easygoing and loves the rainy weather, she plans to return home after the conflict ends. “This war has tested me, but I’ll go back without a doubt.”

In Saudi Arabia, Sara Amir lived with friends from school but often felt homesick. “I was happy to continue studying, but thinking about my father in Khartoum made me very sad,” says Ms. Amir, who graduated from medical school last year.

After she finished her degree, she planned to return home and practice as a doctor in Sudan. Then, RSF fighters killed her uncle, and she realized she would have to stay in Saudi Arabia. “We can’t afford to lose anyone again,” she says.

With so many doctors leaving the country, “the health sector will suffer too,” says Elwaleed Elamin, former director at Sudan’s Alzaiem Alazhari University. That will exacerbate the country’s already massive medical brain drain – since the 1960s, nearly 60% of its physicians have left the country.

“Sudan is not stable... That’s why people are leaving,” says Rawan Khalid, a first-year pharmacy student at Zagazig University in Egypt. She was close to finishing her degree in Sudan when the war broke out. “Now I’m 22 and starting afresh,” she says.

Meanwhile, many students have faced increased costs studying abroad.

In Sudan, for instance, Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman paid about $100 a semester at Ahfad University for Women. The university helped them transfer to the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport in Egypt, but tuition there was 50 times as high.

So they put together the GoFundMe page, which they called “Help Two Sudanese Students Finish Medical School.”

And soon, the donations poured in. “Caribbeans, Germans, Serbians... they saw our posts and offered to help,” Ms. Alrashid recalls.

Eventually, she and Ms. Suleiman raised enough to pay their tuition bill and rent an apartment with three Sudanese classmates. Classes began in mid-December.

Ms. Alrashid says she is overjoyed to return to the simple routines of being a student, like preparing her morning cup of coffee and taking notes in lecture halls.

“No one realizes how much these things matter until you lose them,” she says. “I lost it, so I know.”

Hiba Ishag contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters/File

Facing higher costs and a new generation of diners, restaurants like McDonald's are paring menu prices with value deals. McDonald's now offers customers a second sandwich for $1 and allows franchises to create their own value deals. The McDonald's golden arches logo is seen in Arlington, Virginia, Jan. 27, 2022.

McDonald’s rolled out its McValue menu Tuesday, the fast-food chain’s biggest attempt in years to win back customers put off by high menu prices that have soared 40% since the pandemic.

It’s the latest sign of how American restaurants, large and small, are trying to cope with the inflationary shock and a changing consumer base that have hit the industry hard. Last year, several high-profile eateries declared bankruptcy, including national chains Red Lobster and TGI Fridays.

Through October, that was the fastest rate of failures since the 2020 pandemic year, Bloomberg News reported. Analysts expect more bankruptcies this year.

Despite the news of bankruptcies and other struggles, this volatile industry isn’t shrinking; it’s transitioning.

Restaurants are experimenting with smaller menus and leaner staff to trim costs as they cope with higher costs and a new generation of diners with different tastes and spending habits than their parents, including less alcohol consumption. Others are paring menu prices with value offerings. McDonald’s, for example, now offers customers buying a sandwich, fries, or a breakfast item to buy a second one for $1 and is allowing franchisees to come up with their own value deals.

“It’s definitely a winners and losers market,” says Andrew Sharpee, partner and managing director at AlixPartners, an international consulting firm.

What separates strugglers from successes?

Among the successes are up-and-comers like Cava, a fast-casual Mediterranean chain based in Washington, D.C., and more established chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill and Texas Roadhouse, a steakhouse chain.

“Texas Roadhouse is a lesson in how to make it work,” says Stephen Zagor, a restaurant consultant and professor at Columbia Business School. “They’re listening to the customer, and the customer is saying, ‘Give us a good time. Give us really good value. Give us some fun, but give us a little bit of different.’” (Besides its hand-cut steaks, the chain is famous for its freewheeling atmosphere, free peanuts, and rolls with cinnamon butter.)

The tumult has triggered plenty of experimentation.

At the high end, some chefs are opening new restaurants within restaurants – and personally serving several-course meals to groups as small as four at the back of the kitchen and under another name.

At the low end, eateries are paring costs every way they can, incorporating automation while cutting hours of service and menu items, and maintaining bare-bones staff. Denny’s, once known for its 24/7 service, has reduced the hours of many of its restaurants. This past fall, a Wendy’s outlet in Rochester, New York, began closing its dining room after the breakfast rush, serving only drive-thru customers for lunch while would-be sit-down diners rattled locked doors.

Brian Snyder/Reuters/File

Rising costs, changing tastes, and demands for higher worker pay have forced restaurants to adapt or close. A "Help Wanted" sign hangs in a restaurant window in Medford, Massachusetts, Jan. 25, 2023.

Even Starbucks, the world’s most valuable restaurant brand, is struggling. Traffic plunged 10% year over year, the coffee chain reported in October. At the same time, employee dissatisfaction caused thousands to stage a pre-Christmas strike that, at its peak, shut down 300 Starbucks locations, according to the workers union.

How have consumers responded to higher prices?

The fallout from the pandemic has forced restaurants to focus on value. As they began to reopen, restaurants had to cope with a shortage of cooks and waiters, causing them to raise pay and menu prices. A surge of inflation in everything from food to rent pushed up menu prices even more.

As the pandemic eased, consumers didn’t care at first. Newly liberated from their homes and flush with stimulus cash, they flooded back to restaurants. But as prices kept rising and stimulus money dwindled, they balked. When a picture of a $17.59 Big Mac meal in Connecticut went viral on the social platform X in 2023, it sparked a social media debate about high fast-food prices.

Keeping diners coming through the doors and placing online orders means restaurants are having to shift to more creative, compelling, and streamlined food service.

Eventually, the economic shock will prove temporary as restaurants figure out how to lower costs without compromising value, analysts say. Already this past November, more restaurants reported increased customer traffic than decreased traffic, according to the National Restaurant Association. That’s the first time that’s happened in 20 months. And 3 in 5 restaurants reported a net increase in same-store sales year over year, the highest proportion in 16 months.

Turnarounds can be tricky

But the turnaround is just beginning. Adjusted for inflation, industry sales were still down nearly 2% from November 2023.

Coping with the change in consumers may prove more difficult. In the past, high restaurant prices would have sent people downmarket – replacing a night out at a traditional restaurant with a fast-food meal, says Mr. Sharpee at AlixPartners. Now, “They’re just not dining out as frequently.”

Consumer shifts are partly about generational change. “What we’re seeing is a significant demographic shift in the marketplace, and that’s a permanent thing,” says Alex Susskind, senior director of programs at Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Compared with their parents, millennials, and especially members of Generation Z “are consuming less alcohol, at least as a whole. And that’s the foundation of a lot of these casual dining restaurant chains,” he adds. Also, “They’re more frugal.”

“Restaurants realize that they have to expand outside of the old days of someone knocking on the door and saying, ‘Hello, I have a reservation,’” says Mr. Zagor, the Columbia professor. They have to make food for pickup, open neighborhood pop-up locations, and cater events. “The sales are there,” he adds, “but the sales are coming differently.”

It was 15 years ago when Dutch environmental journalist Martine Postma was finally moved to action over all the appliances she saw being thrown away in her Amsterdam neighborhood.

Despite being reparable, malfunctioning coffee machines, electric kettles, irons, and the like were ending up in landfills. And all the while, manufacturers made more and sold cheap, contributing to carbon dioxide emissions and exacerbating climate change, to Ms. Postma’s frustration. “At that time, repair was not seen as something normal,” Ms. Postma says. “You couldn’t do it anywhere.”

So on Oct. 18, 2009, she arranged a local event where volunteers skilled in repairs would try to fix broken devices that community members brought in, free of cost. She had no idea if anyone would show up.

But as soon as the doors of the venue opened, people began streaming in with their defective items. In addition to all the repairs, the event created an opportunity for people of different social and economic backgrounds to come together and bond. “The huge interest really surprised me,” Ms. Postma says. “It showed that people want to do the right thing but have to be enabled to do so.”

Her first “Repair Café” turned out to be a resounding success.

Today, the Repair Café movement has spread to more than 40 countries across six continents, with nearly 3,200 Repair Cafés in operation, including 200-plus community repair programs in the United States. Moreover, the Repair Café Foundation, which Ms. Postma set up in 2010, has helped foster legislative changes to make repairing more accessible in Europe.

Martin Waalboer/Repair Café International

Nearly 100 volunteer repairers participate in the Repair Café XL event at The Hague to mark the 15th anniversary of Repair Cafés.

“The Repair Café Foundation has not only stuck around, but coalesced into a political force in the Western world that has driven the adoption of repair-friendly consumer laws,” says Adam Minter, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the author of two books on waste, recycling, and reuse.

“That’s a notable contribution to early 21st-century sustainability,” he adds. The foundation “can be an important example in developed countries that no longer incorporate repair into most consumer product cycles.”

“Energy is saved”

Experts say that repair events are a vital step toward a more sustainable economy. “By extending the life of products, [they] reduce the demand for new raw materials,” says Jelle Pothoven, strategic communications adviser at Dutch environmental information organization Milieu Centraal. “When resources are conserved, the carbon footprint is lowered, and energy is saved.”

In 2023 alone, Repair Cafés around the world saved over 1.4 million pounds of broken appliances from going to a landfill, according to the foundation’s 2023 annual report. That translates to more than 33 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions prevented from entering the atmosphere, based on the calculation method of British researcher Steve Privett.

Ms. Postma hopes that the reach of the cafés extends even further. Their current 3,200 “is still a very low number,” she says matter-of-factly. “Every community should have a Repair Café,” she adds. “We can have millions of Repair Cafés around the world.”

That ambition got a monumental boost in Europe when the European Union adopted a “right to repair” directive in April 2024. Ms. Postma and the Repair Café Foundation played a key role in achieving this milestone, with the legal text of the legislation mentioning Repair Cafés multiple times.

But for Ms. Postma and the foundation, the legislation is just the first step. They are now working toward an extension of this legislation, which currently applies only to a limited number of products.

Ms. Postma points out that under the current law, a manufacturer can offer to replace a broken item instead of repairing it, in situations in which repair is more expensive than replacement. “This rules out [fixing] a whole range of cheap and low-quality products, which are precisely the ones likely to break soon,” she says.

Anne Pinto-Rodrigues

A volunteer repairer fixes an antique clock at a Repair Café in Amsterdam.

Bringing communities together

Repair Cafés have evolved over their existence, particularly in regard to who wants and supports them, Ms. Postma notes. In the beginning, it was mainly environmental activists who wanted to organize them, she says. But later, as it became evident that the cafés brought the community together, people who wanted to do something for their own neighborhoods also became interested.

“Over time, we’ve seen the motivations change and become broader,” says Ms. Postma. “Now with the starter kit, more people are starting their own Repair Cafés.” The starter kit is now available in English, Spanish, French, and German, in addition to Dutch, and can be downloaded for a voluntary fee of €49 ($53).

The attitudes of appliance manufacturers have also changed dramatically. “Earlier, product manufacturers didn’t want to be associated with us,” Ms. Postma says. “They said that repairing is dangerous, and that it shouldn’t be done by an amateur.”

Nowadays, manufacturers are themselves contacting the foundation. “They want to discuss the repairability of their products,” she says.

Robert Riede, who in 2018 co-founded the Repair Café Jeltje in Amsterdam’s Old West neighborhood, has observed another heartening trend. In the past, the main repair person has generally been someone who is retired or otherwise out of the workforce. But that is changing, he says. “A new generation – 25 to 35 years of age – is now spreading the Repair Café message.”

Ms. Postma is working toward getting repairing introduced as a subject in vocational schools. There is also a huge amount of interest from other educational institutions, which are using the foundation’s starter kit to set up Repair Cafés. “Parents don’t know how to repair, so they can’t teach their children,” she says. “It [repairing] needs to be taught in school.”

“Organizations like the Repair Café Foundation can and do play a critical role in presenting new ways of consuming and maintaining stuff, to a younger generation open to new forms of consumerism,” says Mr. Minter, the Bloomberg Opinion columnist.

Ms. Postma remains dedicated to her mission of making the infrastructure for getting repairs as rich and diverse as that for buying new items. “Getting a repair should be just as easy,” she says. “You should have many options when you want to get an item repaired.”

Like Repair Cafés, several other initiatives are steadily gaining momentum. The Restart Project in the United Kingdom focuses on the repair of electronic items, while Fixit Clinic in the U.S. organizes community repair events.

“More people now understand that we need to start consuming differently, use less resources, and create less waste,” Ms. Postma says. 

REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria

A government flyer offering a reward for information leading to the capture of Edmundo González Urrutia, in Caracas, Jan. 7, 2025. The Venezuelan opposition leader, seen as the legitimate president-elect, has vowed to return to be inaugurated as president on Friday.

On Monday, leaders in Canada and the United States upheld the principle that democracy depends on the acceptance of defeat. That ideal now faces a more vigorous test in Venezuela.

Nicolás Maduro, who has ruled the South American country with an iron hand since 2013, intends to take the presidential oath Friday. He says he won the right to a third term in elections last July – and while he has refused to provide official ballot results, he has asserted that claim with brutal force.

Backed by loyal judges and generals, the regime has imprisoned roughly 2,400 Venezuelans, marking a single-year increase of politically motivated incarcerations of roughly 750%, according to the Caracas-based organization Foro Penal. Many were peaceful protesters. Some are adolescents. At least two dozen people have died in violent crackdowns by security forces.

While Mr. Maduro resorts to hard tactics, his opponents – some hounded into hiding, others into exile – are marshaling the weapons of a softer power. In recent days, Edmundo González Urrutia, seen internationally as the legitimate president-elect, has been traveling across the region, meeting leaders from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Washington.

More significant was his appeal Sunday to the one institution he sees as vital to restoring democracy to Venezuela. “Our national armed force is called upon to be a guarantee of sovereignty and respect to the people’s will,” he said in a message to the armed forces posted on Facebook.

Rather than vilify the military, however, he sought – as its prospective commander in chief – to coax its higher principles through common purpose. “It is our duty to act with honor, merit and conscience, guided by the values that unite us as a fundamental institution of the Republic,” he said. 

That message underscores that democracy finds its strength in respecting opponents and exercising power with restraint. “A democracy stays alive only by grace of democratic ways of doing things,” noted Mark Bovens, emeritus professor of public administration at the Utrecht University School of Governance in the Netherlands, in a talk last year. “Many of these ways of doing things are not formally defined anywhere.”

Forced to take refuge in Spain in September, Mr. González vows to return home in time be sworn in Friday – even if he has to stage his own parallel inauguration ceremony and in spite of a bounty Mr. Maduro has tied to his immediate arrest. Together with María Corina Machado, a hugely popular opposition leader banned from running in the July election, Mr. González has called on Venezuelans to fill the streets in peaceful protest.

Mr. Maduro has the security forces on standby. “All the regime has left is fear,” Ms. Machado told Agence France-Presse, adding, “In the end, the only way to be free is to overcome fear.”