Originally Posted by
kipper
For many, they found it was more lucrative to collect unemployment with the pandemic funds, as opposed to work with restricted capacity.
Definitely. I have a good friend, not in the restaurant business, who was laid off because of COVID about a year ago. He was doing in-person, traveling sales. Obviously that wasn't happening, and they didn't need as much staff working from home. He didn't look for a job for quite a while, because with the increased unemployment, and his wife still working, they were actually doing pretty well. There was no real incentive to look for a job until it ran out.
Originally Posted by
Eastbay1K
This is a multi-fold problem, and some of it is inherently political. And some is just basic economics.
I have some friends that own a local eatery - mid-scale, local gathering place, decent food and a good bar, and they've thrown in the towel. When we last spoke, they were describing the out of pocket costs just to reopen including restocking the food supply, hiring and paying staff with very limited receipts at first startup - they decided they didn't want to go back into debt for this. The $ involved really surprised me, and they weren't exaggerating.
The restaurant industry was already on the verge of collapse, pre-COVID. COVID just sped up Restaurant Darwinism with respect to quite a number of places that won't reopen.
Staff that might want to work in restaurants just can't afford to. Between limited service hours and limited capacity, the net take home pay might not even cover basic expenses. In places with the tipped minimum wage, it is probably even worse. In the SF Bay Area, public transit remains severely curtailed - frequency and hours. Many restaurant workers commute from substantial distances - and now can't even work a dinner shift and take BART home. And then there's a child care component for some.
And the restaurants, for the most part, don't have another dime to contribute to wages. I hope the credit that ... mentions above makes a substantial dent in keeping some of the industry afloat during this recovery period.
Other than the BART closures, all of your very good points are economics, not politics. I think the reality is that restaurant demand has decreased, and the economics don't make sense in many cases now - for either the restaurant or the employees. Even the "politics" like minimum wage changes are truly more about economics than politics. Some restaurants can manage, financially, to the changes and some can't. I think a credit to get restaurants fully reopened makes a lot of sense, because closure was forced upon them - politicians interfered to close them, they can interfere to re-open them, it's fair. After that, maybe the best thing we can do for the industry is let the free market run it's course without any more interference.