Bankruptcy forces ice cream chain to close 500 locations

Call it collateral damage. Sometimes a business gets hurt through no fault of its own.

Thousands of restaurants and retailers, for example, lost customers when the Covid pandemic forced people to work from home. If people didn't go to work, they didn't have an opportunity to get coffee from the shops built to serve their buildings or by lunch from nearby restaurants.

Related: Iconic Baskin-Robbins local ice cream rival closes after 40 years

Since many companies kept either a work-from-home or hybrid schedule after the impact of Covid ebbed, many of those customers simply never came back. That was not the fault of those businesses, but they suffered anyway.

It's like when The Avengers smash their way through New York City in an effort to save the world. The end product is worth it, but a lot of good people have their homes, businesses, and cars smashed while Hulk fights Ultron, or Thanos.