Because that's what the word "essential" means: Things you can't do without. Not "things I really really really like."
How are you measuring value?
People who save lives > people who don't save lives.
Then there is the twisting of "essential" -- the home center needs to say open because if a pipe busts in your house you need to get replacement parts to fix it. But most people go to the home center to pick up materials for home projects that they can now do because they suddenly have a large amount of at-home time on their hands.
This gets tricky. Of course we know that when there's a fire, a firefighter is often imminently essential. But it's trickier to imagine a society where all "non-essential" jobs are banned indefinitely. You wouldn't die in a matter of minutes like in the fire example, but you'd also probably find such a society unrecognizable to the extent that you might reconsider what types of jobs are and aren't "essential." There'd be a lot of poverty, a lot of hunger, and yes, it would cause a lot of people to die.
The information was out there..
Not where I live. All restaurants were shut down, even for take-out. They were only allowed to offer take-out food when restrictions started being lifted.
It just seems to me shutting down takeout makes it harder to enforce a lockdown. It assumes everyone is able to cook, which doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption.
It's no wonder we're still muddling along with this problem, months into it.
It's a pretty twisted definition of "essential" to include only the things that are definitely going to kill you if you go without and not to include the things that just might kill you.
Again, doctors and firefighters might look “essential” for a secular and technological society like ours (one where we’re afraid of death and where we value physical stuff that could burn) but that hasn’t always been the case. It still isn’t in many parts of the world.
In my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) often times the barber was also the doctor and the dentist (was called "felcer).
Unless things change over time, as such requiring new facilities. We didn't have nuclear power station inspectors (or regulations) thousands of years ago, so are they also non-essential?
> It still isn’t in many parts of the world
There are "many" places in the world were death is not feared and people are happy to see their stuff burn? Barring nomadic jungle tribes with no persistent possessions or home locations in the first place, which societies are you describing?
The fact that our ancestors commonly died of tuberculosis doesn't mean they where happy to do so.
So what? What does that have to do with anything?
you could say that... even sex-workers are more essential than doctors and fire-fighters.
You can say that, but you'd be wrong. That's the great thing about the internet. Anyone can say anything no matter how false it is, and they get to be on an equal footing with people who know what they are talking about.
Income is trivially addressed, given political will.
Part of fairness is in treating equal things equally, and unequal things unequally.
Even talking about non-first responders, the folks in supermarkets are more essential on this spectrum than beauticians of various niches IMHO.
There was someone on WGN-TV a few weeks ago lamenting that it was insulting for all of the hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors to be called "non-essential."
I thought it was more insulting for that person to value the work of hairdressers and manicurists and yoga instructors on an equal basis with firefighters, doctors, paramedics, and actual real "essential" workers.
Nobody calls a holistic lifestyle consultant to run into a burning building to save a baby.