Server shortages
 

I hope we can discuss this without getting all political. Probably not.

Lately, restaurants near me have been failing, cutting hours and restricting seating due to a shortage of help. We waited 30 minutes last night for a table. The place had a half full parking lot. But one side of the dining room was blocked off. This is not social distancing related, just a lack of employees to wait tables. Our server was running nonstop throughout our visit. I don’t know how many tables he covered but none got the attention they expected. The nearest restaurant to my home, a Beef O’Bradys that we patronized for takeout throughout the last year, has shut its doors. The word is that no one wanted to work there. Our local pizza parlor is quoting 3 hour delivery times because the owner is delivering after she closes the kitchen. She can’t get help except for her 2 young children.

I’m tempted to go back to work, not for the pay, but to keep some of these places open so we can continue to enjoy them. Is the age of restaurant dining over?

I agree there's no reason to make this political - although that seems to be everyone's default these days if you disagree with them. We should be able to look at the facts. I haven't observed the same issue, but of course restaurants here are only partially open.

The most interesting part of your post is "no one wanted to work there". The questions are why does no one want to work there, and is that the same at other restaurants in the area? Is it that one restaurant isn't a competitive employer, or is job supply higher than demand (or both)?

Ultimately, restaurants will find a way to give people what they want, both customers and employees. If one can't, someone else will figure it out and replace it. The beauty of a free market.

It's happening here in the Bay Area. Chronic staffing shortages both in the front and back of the house. And after several months of either closure or limited capacity, the restaurants don't have money to throw at the problem.

The restaurant revitalization credit opens today, and it's lucrative. Basically, its a grant equal to the difference between your 2019 and 2020 revenue, less any PPP funds received, subject to limitations. Big set asides for smaller businesses, and priority for historically disadvantaged folks. Hopefully, many businesses can avail of this, and use the cash infusion to attract and retain the requisite work force.

I still go back to the "no one wants to work there" statement. Isn't a grant just temporary? What happens when it runs out?

Here's something else I've been thinking about. How have lunch restaurants fared? I'm talking about places that were near office buildings, corporate parks, or in downtowns. In downtown Chicago, there were literally hundreds of places that were open only for breakfast and lunch in the loop. With people working from home, and maybe many not going back into an office building full time, will they survive? It seems like a different dynamic than those places that mainly attract evening and weekend non-business customers.

For many, they found it was more lucrative to collect unemployment with the pandemic funds, as opposed to work with restricted capacity.

There's a local chain in my area that was primarily a lunch restaurant. They served soup, salads, and sandwiches, and most of their business came from the lunch crowd. They offered numerous catering packages for office lunches. Most of their locations have closed.

Before this crisis of the past year, there was already a (purported) employee shortage which restaurant owners complaining they actually having to work front line (as, IMO, they should). That was for fast food (part of the reason was teens who would once work are now doing stuff that will help improve chances of college/university admission). As for finer dining, it certainly was where I am (acute kitchen staff shortage in specific). Neighbouring very popular tourism city reportedly had more people leaving the trade than joining (something like 4 leaving for every 3 joining). Again, all this dates back much further than a year ago.

My solution is to offer a more streamlined table service with a lot less fussing (French style if you will) and simplified (or at least abbreiviated) menu and not try to cater for everyone's tastes and peculiarities. It may well be a case of over-restauranting and not enough supply of staff. Is the economy where you are so hot that no one wants restaurant jobs?

That' what may in the old fogey RV crowd are saying.

Some may be wealthy but they live a very different life from most FTers. Below is their discussion.

https://www.irv2.com/forums/f64/work...ue-532856.html

On that subject, the great recession of '08 resulted in complete RV assembly closures and bankruptcies. Many of the skilled workforce (or as skilled as the could be) left and never came back. The quality of the workforce hired to replace them apparently leaves a lot to be desired. Quality of assembly in the past decade+ is reportedly nightmarish for new owners, let alone used.

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.

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.

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.

It's a real thing. My family owns restaurants and many locations are take-out only because they can't find enough employees to staff the dining rooms. They're citing two reasons: generous covid unemployment and the anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration.

My family used to own a home in northern Michigan on Little Traverse Bay. It is a vacation destination where the population grows significantly with the arrival of people who have summer houses or just want a vacation in the area. For years, a number of the larger establishments brought in servers and others in the hospitality industry from Jamaica in particular, because they could not find local staff for the season. I can't remember what the visa type is, but a lot of larger restaurant groups and hotels seem to use it when there are local staffing shortages.

I think it's probably the H2B visa for hospitality workers. As someone stated above, when millions of people became unemployed during the start of the pandemic, the prior administration put a freeze on these visas - I believe it was frozen in summer 2020, maybe limited somewhat before that. By law, H2B visas can only be offered if there are no qualified US workers available for the job. So it kind of made sense with all the hospitality workers that lost their jobs then. It's probably a bit of a moot point right now, as most US borders are still "closed" anyway because of COVID. And then of course the enhanced unemployment benefits contribute to US workers not applying for these jobs. At this point, with things re-opening, it likely makes sense to end any COVID benefits and restart the H2B program. Maybe both have been done already...I'll admit I haven't paid close attention. Just what I recall from last year.

And then the nativists will (restart) their complaints that they can't understand a word that their servers are saying.

I don't consider myself a nativist, but I do get annoyed when someone directly serving the public is unable to communicate with me. I don't often find that to be the case with servers, but I do have other examples. A nativist would say they shouldn't be allowed to work here. To me, it's more about doing a job you have the skills for, and communication is a job skill for many front line jobs.

Can't get the workers with the desired skill set for that kind of employment, essentially, at the wages and conditions offered. There are workers with the skill but it's just not worth their while for the pay and work conditions. I've heard some native U.S.-ians who I have to say I could not understand a word they said (presumably some regional accent), not to mention the other skills.

Canada had a non-agriculture temporary worker programme (TFW) akin to the H-2B until a few (or more than a few) years ago. Restaurant owners then (and still now) were complaining that they couldn't find any workers domestically. The reply from some economists was that they couldn't find any workers, at the wages they were willing to pay. That programme has been long scrapped (it reduced worker mobility as workers were tied to the employer) in favour of further increasing immigration amounting to some 1% of the population per annum. These workers are able to find employment better than what restaurants are offering so still a shortage.

My other solution. Conscript the college-bound to a year or two of poorly-remunerated servitude. This could also provide the hotel crew for U.S.-flagged cruise ships.

Yes, this is all fine. All I'm saying is that if I can't understand someone who is providing me service, I'm likely to complain about it, and I'm less likely to bring my business back. I'm struggling with this currently, with a non-restaurant service provider. We've used pictures, Google translate, etc. It's not a great experience, and I'm complaining about it and if someone were to ask me who I used for the service, I would give a warning. Just because someone complains about it doesn't make them a nativist.

This has also been discussed in Hawaii forum and TRs under the TR category. Insufficient staff because of uncertainty of upcoming business. Bandwagon clients like me who prefer saving money and now rarely go to any restaurant whether service or Carryout. I would gladly cook every future meal at home even if “cook” means to reheat something bought at Costco. I’m a decade in “overspend” so it’ll take me over a decade to just save money with groceries versus any restaurant. That the service is less just makes me less interested. I don’t really care about the reasons for service because it’s ultimately none of my business how others choose to live when I’m not affected. I’m already too busy making sure that any at-risk people aren’t coming near me when I’m out of the house.

No, but I think all nativists would be complainants of "poor" (or foreign-accented) English spoken by servers.

Back to the labour situation, it reminds me of a photocopied cartoon saying my bike mechanic had decades ago

boiled down t "fast good cheap, pick two" or not even one as far as its goes with trades where I am.

A few weeks back my sister told me about a restaurant near her being unable to find staff. The owner blamed it on overly-generous Covid unemployment/benefits. She was telling the story as a means of political critique ("government handouts," that sort of thing).

I was initially skeptical, but after thinking about it I realized that in certain sectors of the economy, this probably IS true. I mean, few people really plan to make a career of serving tables, do they? It's not like in France.

A few days later I saw the retort from the other side. "Employers are paying such low wages and have such poor working conditions that workers don't want to return if they don't have to."

Myself, I think both arguments are right. They're not really mutually exclusive, are they? (It's nice that people in this thread have maintained the objective, civil tone of the OP.)

I also wonder if the switch to take-out may have some lasting effect. I've gotten so accustomed to it, I doubt I'll ever return to as much eating out as before. Maybe they won't need as many servers going forward?

I see a lot of places going to an order-at-the-counter type of thing to save on staffing. This was already a trend in my area pre-Covid but seems to be increasing in popularity. Rising labor costs and regulations has made it difficult to maintain the status-quo so things are definitely changing. I worked in the biz for 15 years and have spent tons of time in restaurants as a consumer. When it's done right, ordering at the counter can be okay.... when it's done wrong it can be miserable. Mainly, places have to find a way to avoid making people just stand in line for long periods. Phone apps, tablets, enough counter staff, whatever... It's not even a matter of getting your stuff quickly. It's just kind of a drag to go out in hopes of spending time with certain people only to end up standing in line with a bunch of strangers waiting to order something.

The summer tourist season in the Florida panhandle has long functioned on the backs of H2B visas- typically college kids fro ma middle income country (Brazil, Romania, Russia, Bulgaria) who were here both for the money and because time spent working in America and really fluent language skills that often brought better job opportunities once they graduated. Summer unemployment here typically runs less than 4% so nope, not taking jobs away from local Americans.

Exactly what they were designed for. The issue last year, as I understand it, was that it was difficult to believe that after millions of US restaurant workers lost their jobs we needed a foreign labor supply to supplement. I think that time has passed and the visa program should be re-opened. Of course, the other issue is even with visas, it can be difficult to get into the country because of COVID issues. Just like all things COVID, it appears a return to normalcy may be a longer transition than we expected.

I saw an interview with someone from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas (the consulting firm) this morning. He largely confirmed the data shows that the increased unemployment benefits are a major reason for the problem. Paraphrasing him, people don't want to go back to work when they're making as much as they were at their job.

Living in Panama City, I’ve met quite a few of them. The same was true in East Tennessee - I was amazed at all the Eastern European accents behind the counters in Gatlinburg. It’s funny though, growing up it was different. There, Cape Cod was the place with a low population and high demand for seasonal restaurant and shop workers. I had friends that filled those roles between semesters of college and after high school, living in cramped dormitories and surviving Campbells soup and Wonder bread.

At least the Eastern Europeans are understandable. Not at all like the Comcast (or fill in the blank) call centers in India and the Philippines. Those workers seem to have larger English vocabularies but much thicker accents.

The story behind the “I don’t want to work there” is likely a combination of poor hours, poor pay, no benefits and poor patronage. The Subway in the same shopping center has cut back hours due to lack of help. I have read less than stellar reviews of the places that are failing to attract employees. That keeps the crowds low, and it’s a vicious cycle. Some of these places won’t recover, no matter what and might not deserve to.

I have been hoping that the places that close will reopen with new owners, new concepts. There will have to be some very good deals on spaces and equipment after the big shake out. But without employees, possibly not.

I’m a little tired of takeout after twice a week for a year. One way we are coping is lunch at 3 in the afternoon. Places are open and uncrowded. Service is respectable and the food comes out pretty quickly as well.

I'm sure that's true for some, and it's actually always been the case in the hospitality industry. The two new variables that have been introduced are a pandemic and getting paid the same amount to not work - so now they have a choice that didn't exist before. I can also see some people simply saying they don't want to work there because they fear contracting the virus. One would hope and assume that fear would be diminishing as people are vaccinated though.

It isn't just virus fear. In some areas, it is disgusting and disrespectful customer behavior, spewing political hatred at a server just trying to do his/her job. Last week, I had a server thank me when I went to pull up my mask as she approached. (Generally, compliance around here is very high, as well as respect for the comfort level of whomever may be around you.) When I was recently in Honolulu, I witnessed such behavior. The locals were beside themselves. On my taxi ride back to HNL, the driver was relaying a incident from the prior evening, when a waitress, who just got off her shift, broke down and cried in the taxi due to the barrage of disrespect thrown at her during her shift while she was just trying to have her customers obey the local rules.

I've lived in a "server shortage" region for years. Most restaurants can't pay enough for people to live around here - at least not on a single income. A dear friend (still mostly unemployed) had a job for 15+ years at a long time local spot, made a decent amount of money, and still needed a second part time job to make ends meet with a very frugal lifestyle (i.e., home cooking, one vacation in 5+ years, old car, etc.)

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. If I were a restaurant owner at the end of a not-great lease term, and my landlord wasn't willing to have a serious chat, I'd give thought to shopping around for a lovely built out space and move. There will be a lot of them - with multi-6 figure build outs, sitting vacant.

The extended federal unemployment benefits work out to about $7.50 an hour for a 40 hour week. If an employer is still trying to pay less than minimum wage because of the ‘server exemption’, basic economics would indicate that most people aren’t going to jump at a $5.63 an hour (FL minimum wage for tipped employees) and less than 40 hours per week.

Let’s face it, restaurants are competing with a lot of jobs that pay a lot more with less exposure to the public. Plus, the tips have been so poor due to the pandemic. You simply can’t afford to live on ‘server wages’.

Restaurants are in a squeeze but they are going to have to stop paying below minimum wage and expecting the customers to subsidize via tips.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/d...e=articleShare

Do you want to work for one of the restaurants? Maybe you can work as an investor / manager / staffer at your favorites.

it’ll be interesting if former restaurant consumers like me return or continue to eschew. Even with a busy baseball month of 2-3 practices / scrimmages on weekdays 4:30-6:30 plus the saturday game, I’m still preferring to just reheat / prep things in the fridge as opposed to getting carryout.

We still dine at home 6 nights a week. That usually involves preparing 3 meals and serving leftovers the other 3 nights. We’ve begun the hot season and so the screen porch is no longer comfortable and that’s where we would enjoy takeout. So, dining out is going to be one night a week.

We stopped at a World of Beer this afternoon after an hour of looking at flooring samples. At 3:00, happy hour had just begun and there were more bartenders than patrons at the bar. It’s Cinco de Mayo, fer Chrissakes. They started to wander in as we were leaving at 4:30. This is a place that, IME, is packed every time I go in. I hope the full staff is a good omen.

I don’t really want to work anywhere. I’m retired for good. I do like the idea of investing in a restaurant, but I don’t think that helps the staffing issues and I don’t enjoy losing money, which seems likely without servers and cooks.

Here's a take but I don;t think it is going to change any made-up minds.

https://www.eater.com/22417344/resta...benefits-risks

great read. Thank you.

It didn’t change mine. Here in Florida, I don’t see a lot of fear anymore. Vaccinations are open to every adult. The fear was amongst us old folks and we took to Pfizer and Moderna like they were the fountain of youth. I just don’t think workers are staying out of restaurants because they’re worried about getting sick. I think they’re staying home because it’s a crappy job that doesn’t pay well and there is an alternative means of income at the moment.

I don't think it changed my mind, but I think it's valid. There are some people, in all jobs, that are excessively scared of the virus. It stands to reason some of them would be restaurant workers. 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.

Completely agree. I don't like my job either. At my last company, I got a severance package that basically paid me the same amount of money, in a biweekly check, to not work for a year. I didn't once listen to a job offer or talk to a potential employer...until that money ran out. It's just human nature. When the money runs out, I expect many will go back.

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.

I don’t think it’s fear of Covid that’s keeping people from going back to work. The $7.50 an hour federal unemployment checks might be behind some of it.

but these servers were dropped like hot potatoes by these restaurants the minute the pandemic started and they were left to fend for themselves. And they know if there’s another surge, they’ll lose their jobs again.

I know locally in Nashville, the minute these jobs all went away last spring a lot of the people who worked those jobs had to move back home with their parents in whatever town they have left to come to Nashville. And they haven’t come back. Amazon is giving signing bonuses for workers at $15 an hour down the street, and the local restaurants still think they can get away with paying $2.56 an hour for tipped servers in Nashville.

The economics are just not working out for restaurants. The hospitality worker crowd left town and didn’t come back. Or they got higher paying jobs at grocery stores and fulfillment centers.

Around here that ‘alternative means of income” is a job at Amazon paying 3 times the wage of a server, plus benefits, guaranteed 40 hour weeks, plus overtime, plus a signing bonus in a pandemic proof occupation where they won’t get one day notice of restaurant closure.

not too long after the pandemic began, we were noticing the new people working the Publix counter had some serious knife skills, so not hard to guess their previous line of work. And Publix actually has a good wage and excellent benefits package by retail sector standards so a lot of those folks would rather take the stock purchase options and such instead of going back to restaurant work.

There are absolutely better paying jobs out there. But that's always been the case. Perhaps when the government forced his restaurant to close, it was the catalyst for Ricardo to finally look for a new job?

Restaurants didn't drop employees. The government shut down restaurants, effectively eliminating server, host, and busboy jobs. Putting this on restaurant owners doesn't seem fair. As I said above, a restaurant worker could have left before the pandemic for a higher paying job. What changed? It also seems that this worker shortage goes beyond the restaurant industry and is affecting all types of jobs. My boss was telling me that it's been nearly impossible to hire a new sales manager, because demand is greater than supply right now.

The jobs report that came out this morning seems to back the point that people are not taking other jobs, they're just not going back to work. New jobs were much lower than expected. Some states are now moving to restrict the federal unemployment COVID benefits to try to get people back to work. It's a more complex situation than restaurants not paying enough.

It does make sense that some of the restaurant workers who lost their jobs during the shutdown looked for other work. Grocery stores, pizza companies, and some others grew tremendously. I think I saw last spring Domino's was hiring another 10,000 employees. For me, if my old company closed down, and I found a new job, I don't think I'd rush back to my old job if it reopened.

My place of business shut down, I didn’t lose my job. Many of these restaurant owners scored huge PPP loans that they will never pay back. Many are owned by large corporations that enjoyed big profits and paid little taxes. And in many cases, the workers didn’t even get 2 weeks notice, they were just dropped.

So, I do blame the restaurant owners. It is what it is, but if you treat your employees like they are immediately disposal, they should quit whining that they didn’t all come running back.

I live in a big hospitality town. We got hit really hard. Some places tried to cheat and stay open and skirt the rules, and still treated their employees as disposable. Others shut down and still paid the employees or found other things for them to do. Guess who doesn’t have problems hiring people right now? The ones that took care of their employees.

these same restaurants fought through the state Chamber of Commerce to kill any laws that would propose raising the minimum wage on tipped employees. It is illegal in my state for a city to raise the minimum wage above the federal minimum. The hospitality industry has the legislature in its back pocket.

Janet Yellen was right today. She said that if the extra federal unemployment was keeping people from going back to work then you would see the states with the highest unemployment (the most people getting federal unemployment) having the least amount of job gains but that’s not what’s happening. States with the highest unemployment are enjoying the biggest job gains.

A lot of people are somewhat content with doing the familiar same ol' even if they do complain about and are somewhat unhappy/discontent about it. Being forced into a long-ish stretch of unemployment in one's line of business was probably the incentive to go look for work n some other industry..

We went out for Mexican tonight. Plenty of servers.

See? The answer is more open borders!

I’m only half kidding. I went out for dinner tonight for the first time in about a month. There was a help wanted sign out front, but pretty well staffed. It’s a popular place and they pay their servers above the minimum wage.

I think there needs to be some clarity to the above. I don’t believe that the government shut down restaurants, rather, it was indoor dining not being allowed. In my area, many restaurants pivoted to doing takeout and managed to survive up to this point. Indoor dining is now allowed at 100% here. We went out to one of our favorite restaurants last night and while 1/3 of the staff was new, it was fully staffed. We don’t patronize chain restaurants, only locally owned small restaurants. We have had some restaurants close permanently, but, surprisingly, we have had some new restaurants opening during the pandemic.