Why Are Restaurants Short-Staffed?

There have been all kinds of stories in the news lately about restaurants being short-staffed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  I am no longer working in that industry, but I still have deep roots in it and most of my friends are restaurant people.  Restaurant owners and managers are limiting their hours open because they say they are experiencing staff shortages.  On the other hand, restaurant workers are saying that they were laid off during COVID-19 and can't find work.  That just didn't make sense to me so I decided to find out more about it.

In the early days of the pandemic, restaurants closed or cut back to delivery/pick-up only and that left a lot of servers and bartenders without work.  These people make their living on tips, so no customers in the restaurant means no tips.  Most places closed at least for a few weeks while we all sorted out what we were going to do now that we couldn't go to bars, restaurants, clubs, and other gathering places.  Customers opted to stay at home and have groceries delivered in order to avoid contact with others.  We all learned to cook for ourselves again and most of us learned how to make a good sourdough starter and use it to produce a bunch of mediocre bread at home.

While this may have been good for public health, it was terrible for restaurants and their employees.  Restaurant workers whose jobs relied on contact with customers were simply cut off from their primary source of income.  Restaurant owners saw sales drop by 80-90% or more.  If you've ever been involved with the financial part of the restaurant business you will know that a restaurant can't survive more than a few weeks operating with this kind of reduction in sales unless the owner has a very large cash reserve and is willing to pour most of it into the business in order to keep the place open.

I could write pages upon pages describing how hard this was on the restaurant industry and the extreme measures employees and restaurant owners took to get through those many months, but that's not the reason for this post so I'll leave it up to you to go find out more about it in your area.  The one fact that's relevant to this story, however, is that restaurant employees either lived on enhanced unemployment benefits offered by the government or they simply found a better way to make money and left the industry entirely.  Restaurant owners either poured their life savings into their businesses, retooled their operations for delivery/pick-up only, or closed their doors permanently.

Now that restaurants have mostly reopened they're finding out that they don't have enough staff to make their businesses run.  There are tons of restaurant jobs available now and tons of people looking for work, but the jobs are mostly part time or low-paying ones and no one wants them.  Americans prefer to have a single job with regular hours rather than three part time jobs with varying schedules.

Another factor that is contributing to the problem is that customer attitudes have changed.  Before COVID-19 most customers were agreeable and pleasant.  Sure, you had a few assholes, but most people were mostly just out to have fun and a good meal.  Now it seems like there's some kind of sense of entitlement -- like restaurants owe them something for being closed for a long time.  I don't quite get it, but this has always been a problem where I live.  Customers here have always acted like they had a constitutional right to excellent tasting, cheap food and great service.  After places started to reopen, that attitude was still there and multiplied tenfold.  Servers take more abuse in a single week than most of us endure in a lifetime.  They're starting to get smart and realize that there are other ways to make money without having to put up with the verbal abuse and they simply haven't come back to restaurant jobs because they've found new jobs that pay better and don't come with a big serving of verbal abuse.

The bottom line is that after COVID-19 it's even harder to make a living in restaurants than before and until we're willing to treat workers there with dignity and respect and pay them a decent wage for the work they do then we're going to see staff shortages.  If you don't want to see this happen then all you have to do as a customer is be nice and tip appropriately.  By the way, "appropriately" means at least a solid 20%.  Don't run up a $97 bill and then leave a $100 bill on the table and call it good.  If you can't afford to do this, then stay home and cook your own food and clean up after yourself.  I'm not saying this to be mean.  Servers make their living on the tips you leave, not on a salary in the form of a paycheck.  Compensate them properly for the work they do.  And for God's sake, just be nice to them.