SLO County restaurants are closing, cutting hours due to lack of staff. What’s happening?
A sign posted on the door of Old SLO BBQ Co. on Monday morning told customers the popular restaurant in San Luis Obispo’s Marigold Shopping Center wouldn’t be open that day.
“Unfortunately due to staffing shortages, this restaurant location will be closed today to allow us to fill all the positions at our other location” in downtown San Luis Obispo, the sign read.
The letter concluded with a request for people interested in working for the local barbecue chain to submit their resumes.
Across the Central Coast, businesses are being forced to temporarily shutter locations or chop hours due to a widespread worker shortage. The lack of employees is taking its toll on local service-based businesses, especially restaurants.
“Going through the pandemic, we had enough staff, because the demand was down,” Old SLO BBQ Co. owner Matt Pearce told The Tribune. “Now, a shift at the restaurant needs eight or nine people. So even though I’m busier, I can only ... use my staff where they would be most effective. I can’t operate seven days a week, even though I know the business is there.”
The knowledge that there is demand, but not enough workers to support it, is frustrating, Pearce said.
“I could be open for our customers and then everything would be great,” he said. “But I can’t be open, because I don’t have enough staff.”
To cope, Pearce has taken to closing Old SLO BBQ Co.’s Broad Street location early or on certain days, to allow more workers to be at the chain’s flagship location on Higuera Street in downtown San Luis Obispo.
Tourism businesses need workers
Pearce isn’t alone.
San Luis Obispo County Workforce Development Board director Dawn Boulanger said local businesses, especially restaurants, have been feeling the heat of the worker shortage.
She said employers have been asking her one big question: “Where are the people?”
“Our businesses, particularly our small businesses — hotel hospitality, tourism, retail, food industry — are coming back and reopening and customers are coming, but their employees aren’t there,” Boulanger told The Tribune.
Part of the problem, Boulanger said, has been that local small businesses laid off employees because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The businesses expected to be able to rehire those workers once the economy opened back up again — but the employees just aren’t returning.
“I think businesses thought that once they called them back, everybody was going to be excited and ready to come back,” she said. “What they found is when they reached out to try to call these folks back like, ‘Hey, we’re going again, come back to work,’ many of those workers were not ready to come back yet.”
When employees don’t return to their food service jobs, restaurant owners are faced with a quandary: How do you keep serving customers that are anxious to return to in-person dining without enough workers?
“I think it’ll all correct itself,” Pearce said. “It’s just who knows when, and in the time being, we’re just kind of left to do the best we can with the resources that we have.”
San Simeon restaurant closes on Father’s Day
At Manta Rey Restaurant in San Simeon, business has been hopping recently.
But hiring? Not so much.
A weary Miguel de Alba, who co-owns the seafood and steak restaurant with wife Theresa, said they had to “close Manta Rey for Father’s Day because we don’t have the staffing to stay open.”
“I can work the front of the house and I can work the back, but I can’t work both at the same time,” he said. “And I really need a day off.”
When you own a business that doesn’t have enough employees, you have to do all the jobs that are going unfilled, he said.
Just down the road from Manta Rey Restaurant, Linn’s Fruit Bin Farmstore in Cambria has been shuttered entirely because of a staffing shortage and other pandemic-related difficulties.
The Linn family simply doesn’t have enough employees to reopen the popular farm store, according to Aaron Linn, general manager of Linn’s Restaurants Inc. and Linn’s Easy as Pie.
During the holidays, the Linns had to “pilfer stock from (the farm stand) to sell downtown,” Aaron Linn said, “and we haven’t had the time or staff to restock the Fruit Bin.”
“We are concentrating on rebuilding aspects of our businesses in town and are hopeful to open the Fruit Bin sometime in the future,” Linn said. “But we’re unsure when that will be.”
Worker shortage hits SLO County food service industry
Though the unemployment rate is improving both nationally and locally after the coronavirus pandemic decimated many parts of the economy, the number of people returning to the workforce is lower than economists predicted, especially in key service-based industries.
Though this is a problem seen across a number of industries, restaurants, which were among the businesses most impacted by coronavirus layoffs, have been particularly hard hit.
Between February and April 2020, the number of people employed in food service jobs in San Luis Obispo County dropped from 13,000 to only 6,200, according to the California Employment Development Department.
Over the next few months, restaurants hired, fired and rehired workers based on the state’s fluctuating business regulations. All the while, the number of local people employed in the food service industry still remained markedly lower than pre-pandemic numbers.
As restaurants began slowly opening back up at the start of 2020, there was a brief local food service hiring boom.
Between February and March, the local food serve industry added 800 jobs. However, the total number of people working in food service jobs in San Luis Obispo County — 9,700 — was still, again, much lower than its pre-pandemic number.
In general, the most food service jobs tend to be added between January and June. May is typically the month when the highest number of new jobs is added, likely due to the summer rush of tourists and people on vacation.
This year, however, job growth has stagnated since March, with no new jobs added in April and 100 jobs lost in May. (June’s data was not available as of Wednesday.)
It was the first and only time San Luis Obispo County had lost food service jobs in May since the California Employment Development Department began tracking industry data in 1990.
Why is there a worker shortage?
So why are workers in such short supply? It’s likely a compounding of several issues.
When employees were laid off during the pandemic, many took that opportunity to move to different careers, Boulanger said.
Instead of sticking with retail or service industry jobs, where fluctuating coronavirus restrictions made stability unlikely during the peak of the pandemic, they moved to careers or jobs that called for remote work or that offered higher wages.
Some workers may have also had difficulty finding child care while schools switched to virtual-only learning, then hybrid models, Boulanger said, and then decided to leave the workforce all together.
Both Boulanger and Pearce noted that expanded unemployment benefits through the pandemic are also likely keeping potential workers at home, rather than taking jobs “on the front lines.”
“So if you are eligible for $1,000 a week, that was more than our minimum-wage workers are making,” Boulanger said. “(If) you know you’re gonna stay home and collect from unemployment, and you don’t have the child care and you’re not worried about your health and safety of exposing yourself or putting your kids in an unsafe place, then ... you’re not going to have that motivation to go back to work, right?”
Expanded federal unemployment insurance benefits are set to end in September, at which point many workers might start flooding back into the job market, Boulanger said.
Employee, owner burnout a threat to business, SLO County workforce director says
In the meantime, Boulanger said small businesses facing worker shortages need to be on the lookout for employee burnout, which could exacerbate staffing problems.
“You have existing staff who are getting, burnt out because they’re taking on extra shifts or pitching in different roles,” she said. “So I think that’s going to place some strain on the small businesses, right? How long can they sustain when they’re having turnover or their long-standing staff are getting exhausted by covering gaps ... or their owners are taking on new roles?”
Theresa de Alba said she was worried about the employees she and her husband have at Manta Rey Restaurant and their other restaurant, Las Cambritas in Cambria, because of the strain of being understaffed.
“Cambria has been really busy these past two weeks,” de Alba told The Tribune on June 25. “I’m hoping my employees don’t get burned out this summer, because it’s going to be crazy.”
To try to spread the staffing around, Pearce said many of his Old SLO BBQ Co. workers are doing six-hour shifts, six days a week. Normally those employees would work an eight-hour shift, five days a week.
“Unfortunately at the end of the week, they’re getting fewer hours and they’re working more days,” he said. “Everybody has to spread out.”
In addition to difficulty with hiring, Pearce said he’s also having a hard time keeping new workers.
“They’re very flighty, people that we’ve hired recently. They’ve just decided to not come to work,” he said. “I don’t believe we have a hard, difficult place to work. ... I think it’s a good culture and good work and (a) free barbecue meal every time you work. Who wouldn’t want that?”
Because Old SLO BBQ Co. is so short staffed, Pearce said he’s started hiring people as young as 14 — while he previously might have passed on younger or less experienced employees.
“Their parents are friends of mine or my wife or whatever and they’re like, ‘Hey, would you be interested in hiring our son or daughter for their first job?’” he laughed. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I mean, I can’t find anyone else.’ ”
Food service jobs aren’t going away, but hiring could be changing
Though the outlook at the moment seems grim, Boulanger said she doesn’t envision the county’s food service jobs disappearing all together.
“This is kind of the crux of our community and our economy,” she said. “Some of the jobs I think have changed, but those that are particularly struggling right now — the hotels, the food, the retail — you need those, and our community is built on those.”
Instead, she thinks it’s going to be up to small business owners to offer incentives for people to work at their businesses — similar to the way they convince customers to choose them.
“I think it’s just going to be some way the employers are having to look at the care for their workers as equally as the care for their customers now,” she said. “Which could be a good thing.”
Pearce said that’s one of the reasons he thinks his business is struggling to find employees. Those who want to work are finding other, more profitable opportunities, he said.
Pearce said he’s seen other small businesses and restaurants offer hiring bonuses and future anniversary bonuses for new workers, something that before would have been almost entirely unheard of.
Old SLO BBQ Co. even has a referral program where current employees can get $250 if they get their friends to work at the restaurants.
“(That) seems like a decent incentive, except that when I look around, it’s like, this car wash is offering a $500 signing bonus to anybody that joins their team,” Pearce said. “That’s a lot of money. I can’t attract the people.”
For the moment, Pearce said he’s hanging his hopes on more people returning to the workforce once unemployment benefits run out.
In the meantime, he’s asking for a little grace from customers who might not get their tri-tip sandwiches as fast as they are used to.
“It would be great if there was an understanding that the people that are working are working very hard,” Pearce said. “We’re doing the best we can, and so if we forget a french fry on your order, please be kind about it. ... Everybody is working very hard right now to try and make everything work and a little bit of understanding from customers goes a long way.”
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 9:32 AM with the headline "SLO County restaurants are closing, cutting hours due to lack of staff. What’s happening?."
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