People pursuing or having a college degree in many non-technical/non-STEM area are a large part of the reason there isn't a worse "server shortage" than there is in the US.
Originally Posted by
braslvr
Most of the country is in desperate need of tradespeople and has been for many years. 20-30 years ago high schools started suggesting/insisting that EVERYONE should go to college and get a degree.
Given how fast and more extensively young men -- primarily those men from the three largest ethnic backgrounds in the US -- are falling behind women in higher education in the US, I think that the claims that "everyone should go to college and get a degree (from college)" has really not resonated as much as of late as the above seems to suggest.
Most of the developed world is in desperate need of tradespeople, but that really is nothing new -- it's been an issue well before even the 1990s. Even in the developing world, finding competent, trained tradespeople is not a walk in the park -- actually, given my own experiences with housing in Asia and Latin America, I would say a shortage of competent, trained tradespeople is even more of an issue in developing countries than what I encounter in the US and in the higher income parts of Europe.
I still find it surprising how much less expensive and better 69+ year-old locksmiths are in the rural parts of the (US) Upper Midwest than the whippersnappers and others playing locksmiths nowadays in urban areas of the US, Canada and middle and high income parts of Europe.
Server shortage vs. tradespeople shortage? The labor pool has to draw from somewhere, whether it's to serve the F&B market or something else. As prices rise for F&B service and for getting tradespeople's service done, people will substitute increasingly to do do-it-yourself approaches. Probably better for the health of the public if fast food in particular faces a huge rise in prices due to a server shortage, but that's only if it doesn't drive an increase in unemployment/underemployment and all the negative health consequences of poverty (absolute poverty and even relative poverty).
Server shortage or not, low unemployment or not, employers are increasingly going toward automation and self-service approaches as a means of cost-cutting and being less subject to staffing issues than is already inherent in the F&B marketplace.