Originally Posted by
JBord
… But all kinds of workers whose jobs weren't forced to shut down by the government have gone to work every day - are we seeing grocery store clerks and stockers quitting in droves and refusing to come back? There has to be another factor, and I think that factor is the higher unemployment pay folks have received due to the pandemic...
There have always been jokes about restaurants failing or press about razor-thin margins. It makes sense that it’s hard to return to a restaurant job when there are other jobs with steady pay. When we last went to carmel, we went to our beloved fondue restaurant and observed that Ricardo wasn’t there that night. Then we went to our usual Safeway (which had a closed self-checkout) and at cashier checkout, With the added masks, I realized that Ricardo was our checkout guy. We chatted and didn’t go into details about his job change; he mentioned helping a friend with their restaurant on weekends albeit in Marina which is a tad farther for us. So I can imagine that he recognized that he’d get a better steady compensation as a starting staffer at Safeway instead of continuing his longtime job as a manager/server at a fondue spot.