During the pandemic, many restaurants scraped by at best.
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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).
