HOW A STAFF SHORTAGE IS FORCING RESTAURANTS TO GET CREATIVE
The owner of Taco Bamba Taqueria peered out from the kitchen at the line of customers snaking around the corner at his latest spot in a suburban Virginia strip mall, and felt terror. Who was going to cook, serve and clean up for all these people?
“The cooks had left,” overwhelmed by the crowds, says Victor Albisu, who owns four Taco Bambas in the region, with a new upscale Mexican place on the horizon. “The wait staff had left. The chef and sous-chef had walked out because of the amount of business. It doesn’t stop.”
A tight labour market and an explosion of new restaurants have made finding and keeping help ever more difficult across the country.
Last year, the National Restaurant Association reports, 37 per cent of its members said labour recruitment was their top challenge, up from 15 per cent two years ago. With low profit margins leaving little room to do what most businesses do in tight labour markets – increase wages – restaurant owners are having to find other ways to attract and hold onto workers.
They are offering incentives, like repaying culinary-school tuition for their chefs. They are hiring former prisoners as kitchen assistants, and snapping up employees whom competitors have fired. They are trying to retain employees with tequila-tasting seminars, flexible schedules and a faster pipeline up the ranks.
“I think the assumption is, the industry has to continue to evolve in terms of the workforce it is trying to appeal to,” says Gordon Lambourne, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. “People want flexibility, they want some growth defined for them…Readmore