During the pandemic, many restaurants scraped by at best.
Tips
history
From Du Fu's poem 《丹青引赠曹将军霸》: a painter pours 意匠 (artist's mind) into 惨淡经营 — originally meaning "to strain over a composition". The sense later broadened to any exhausting, uphill effort.
usage
惨淡 here is "painstaking / bleak", not "miserable". The idiom can describe either struggling operation (most common today) or meticulous artistic work (original sense).
