The Service Industry Ghost Writer
It has become the new normal; long, slow drive throughs, closed dining rooms, fluctuating business hours (to say the least) and the reasoning is verbiage that has been intensely, and quickly, pressed into the very fabric of our daily vernacular: staff shortage(s).
Turn to any social media platform and there are several posts daily with titles of “nobody wants to work anymore”, “this generation is (blah blah blah)”, and the list goes on. You have read them and like most of us, we now scroll past, rolling our eyes, but knowing deep down that the truth is, times have changed. We have become very accepting of the employees on the front lines, one or two, maybe three, people working in a fast food restaurant that would have been staffed with nine or ten pre-2020. They are true warriors working away, long hours in hot, greasy, and unforgiving conditions trying to serve the relentless stream of customers coming their way. Wave after wave the customers come, and with limited staffing, each new customer is a tiny step toward the forever moving goal posts of the end which is clearly nowhere in sight… or is it?
This article was in fact supposed to be written about the closing of dining rooms, and its effect on customers. However, it took a deep and dark turn when calling 4 different fast food chain restaurants trying to dig into why they are having a hard time hiring. I called Columbus, Mansfield, Akron, Canton, Macedonia, and Twinsburg. After speaking with 4 Supervisors/Managers of fast food chain restaurants* (3 would not talk to me), the common thread is what saddened me to my core and made me want to vomit. “My manager has hiring signs up but is not hiring so they can get a bigger bonus”. I thought that bonus exploitation was left with the 1990’s, I was wrong. Bonus exploitation is when store management purposely does the “go around” on the safeguards (labor is too low so you are disqualified from bonus) put in place to prevent such or uses loopholes to increase personal bonuses given out by the company. In this case, it is amplifying the shortage on a local level to purposely not hire. We do know that most safeguards have been lowered by the companies because of the pandemic. Therefore, having the dining rooms closed encourages using less labor to service and maintain such large spaces.
We all hear about the huge bonuses the fast food chain restaurant CEO’s are getting while their employees are getting peanuts. What if that were happening in locally? What would you say about bonus exploitation happening in your own backyard? Are there really NO applications coming in? Yet the popular restaurant down the road is hiring for $1 less per hour and their drive through is hopping right along. Now, I agree with some shortage, but to run with only one or two people AND you are paying more than your neighboring competition. All of a sudden, there are absolutely no applicants… for fast food? Hmmm, people are looking for jobs, they want to work. Some cannot work in factories for whatever their personal reasons are but can and always have worked fast food.
There are 7 levels that have bonus ability, but not one of those levels are the hourly employees helping you at the window or making your food.
How many General Managers are one of the TWO employees working at that fast food chain restaurant you just waited in line for 30 minutes for? Which begs the question, are the local managers capitalizing? Now I want to make clear that each chain restaurant operates differently and this may not be the case for every chain fast food restaurant, but it seems like it is becoming a pattern among the few,
A regional gas station which has a presence in our communities, had a store in a town one or two over that was only scheduling 3 people! This manager had applicants but she was turning them down so that manager can get a bigger bonus (in this case, over $9,000 quarterly). She had all of the now hiring signs up, all the banners in the store, even had signs saying “be patient, we are short staffed”, but she only worked 8 hours per day/Monday through Friday, and let the 3 employees handle the rest of the 16 hours and the weekends with no additional help. That managers reply was “I have put in my time and do not do over 8 hours, I earned my weekends”. Digging even deeper, this is a widespread problem. How can a fast food restaurant go from half staffed to NO staff? It might be more than a fast food issue… we continue to dig.
* call placed to national/regional fast food chain restaurants with over 100 units
