- With labor shortages in the country, American restaurants are raising wages to compete with each other.
- The owner of the American farm chain Hamburg raised employee salaries by about 20%, calling it a “biding war.”
- Some of its restaurants are closed one day a week for employees to take a break as diners return in droves.
- View more stories on Business Insider SA’s homepage.
this Severe shortage of restaurant staff The owner of a burger chain in the country said that the entire United States has triggered a “biding war” for employees, which has pushed up wages across the industry.
“Your neighbor in the restaurant next door might bid $1 [per hour, the equivalent of around R15] George Frangos, owner and president of Farm Burger, told Insider, more, and then you go back and bid another $1 to keep your employees.
A pizza franchise even told Bloomberg that he Ask the manager to dig someone from a competitor’s restaurant Because “everything is a fair game.”
The average salary of non-supervised personnel in the catering industry was in May and Soaring to $15.31 in June, Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Wages have risen because Promote the U.S. federal minimum wage of $15, But labor shortages have added fuel to the fire.American chain restaurants include McDonald’s, chili sauce, with Starbucks They all said they would raise their wages.
Frarngos told Insider that he increased the wages of Farm Burger employees by about 20% to $15 an hour.
Farm Burger
“You only need to modify your model slightly and make sure the employees are taken care of,” he said.
Farm Burger has 12 restaurants in the southeastern United States. Frangos said that about 20% of workers left a health problem at the beginning of the pandemic, “and they did not come back.”The number of workers leaving now has risen again, but this time because they want to Change industry, He said.
“Working for more than 30 years, [the labour shortage is] Very unprecedented,” Frangos said, adding that he didn’t know when it would end. “This is a very unique moment in the restaurant’s history. “
Farm Burger
Frangos said restaurants “suddenly became super busy” during the vaccine launch in the United States, exacerbating labor shortages. He said that some of his restaurants decided to close one day a week, “just to give everyone a break.”
He said the labor shortage “affects our team physically and emotionally, which makes the work we work hard to accomplish every day very difficult.”
Other restaurants told Insider that their small footprint means that they have largely managed to avoid the effects of labor shortages because they need fewer employees.
Mark Setterington, CEO of Island Fin Poké, stated that his 18 Poké-bowl restaurants usually require two to three employees per shift. He said that because about 65% of customers are takeaways, the average restaurant area is 110 square meters and has 20 seats.
Island Fin Poké
Setterington said his restaurant was not severely affected by the restaurant shortage, partly because most of its night shift employees are high school students in their first jobs. He said that some of them tipped between $5 and $10 per hour.
The owner, Andrew Pudalov, said that just like Island Fin Poké, the smoothie bowl shop at Rush Bowls usually only requires two to three employees per shift, or four employees if it is really busy.
“We always say this: you are a bartender who provides healthy food,” he told Insider. “So there is no backyard.”
Pudalov added that the labor shortage is “not as challenging as many other companies.” “We are working hard to resolve it.
