Proprietors faced closures, space restrictions and lingering uncertainty. They’re now facing a potentially crippling labor shortage as summer approaches.
We all have come to appreciate being able to welcome guests back and we re super grateful to be hosting again, Pasquarello said recently amid the usual din that greets a day shuffling family and business responsibilities. But it s a different world.
For folks like Pasquarello and his wife, Jeniphur who run three restaurants in the Philadelphia area and are opening another shortly the world has changed dramatically from the one they knew prior to March 2020.
The burdens the hospitality industry have faced eclipsed those from probably any other in the country except for education. Proprietors faced a revolving door of closures, space restrictions, sanitation regulations and a lingering air of uncertainty about what s next.
Updated: 7:23 PM EDT May 6, 2021 By Vanessa Yurkevich, CNN As many parts of the country begin to reopen, things are still far from normal. Hotels and restaurants are struggling to find people willing to come back to the service industry. We have a war of survival, a new war of survival, said New York restaurant owner Philippe Massoud. We have no staff to open for lunch at all. In the U.S., dining out is at about 90% of pre-pandemic levels, according to OpenTable.And while nearly 8.5 million Americans are still unemployed, Massoud said he can t find anyone to fill 15 openings, from manager to dishwasher. Normally you get at least 30, 40, 50 people, 60 people, he said. We only had three people respond to our ads and none of them showed up. In January, restaurant managers said recruitment and retention were their top challenges. By April, that number was up to 57%.Restaurant owners are finding that some employees have left the restaurant industry for good. One
Can you say …
stasis? I knew you could! That’s a word that few expected to hear about the April jobs report. Economists expected to see a million jobs added, even higher than the 916,000 new jobs cited in the March jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After all, April was the first full month in which the COVID-19 relief/stimulus bill was in full effect, and expectations were high for a massive positive reaction to the deluge of cash.
Instead, the BLS reported that the US economy added only a quarter of the jobs economists projected. Not only did the number turn out to be a pedestrian level of 266,000, the BLS recalculated the March report and deducted nearly the same amount:
Updated: 7:23 PM EDT May 6, 2021 By Vanessa Yurkevich, CNN As many parts of the country begin to reopen, things are still far from normal. Hotels and restaurants are struggling to find people willing to come back to the service industry. We have a war of survival, a new war of survival, said New York restaurant owner Philippe Massoud. We have no staff to open for lunch at all. In the U.S., dining out is at about 90% of pre-pandemic levels, according to OpenTable.And while nearly 8.5 million Americans are still unemployed, Massoud said he can t find anyone to fill 15 openings, from manager to dishwasher. Normally you get at least 30, 40, 50 people, 60 people, he said. We only had three people respond to our ads and none of them showed up. In January, restaurant managers said recruitment and retention were their top challenges. By April, that number was up to 57%.Restaurant owners are finding that some employees have left the restaurant industry for good. One