HELP WANTED! (WHERE IS EVERYONE?)

The nationwide hiring crisis is having an especially large impact on fast-casual restaurants. Owners are trying all kinds of tactics to attract and keep employees—and their efforts may change the industry forever.

- MAGGIE GINSBERG

Jason Day’s restaurants were packed. But back in April, he saw trouble coming.

Day is a Penn Station East Coast Subs franchise in Nashville, and after a year of pandemic cabin fever, his newly vaccinated customers were out in force. They had stimulus checks in their pockets and were thrilled to be stuffing their mouths with Philly cheesesteaks. But Day’s staff? Not so much. “You could see the stress getting to some of the employees,” he says.

Meanwhile, all over Nashville, help wanted banners fluttered over drive-throughs, touting signing bonuses and beefed-up pay not typically associated with fast-casual jobs. Nationwide, media reports were rife with stunts to lure in workers—a $10,000 hiring bonus for an assistant manager at a California Jersey Mike’s, free college tuition for Chipotle employees (even part-timers) after only four months on the job, massive “hiring parties” in Taco Bell parking lots.

Day was opening new restaurants—five since October 2020—but he’d found that he had to start the hiring process twice as early to attract a qualified applicant pool. Now he was beginning to worry about keeping the workers he already had.

“How do we compete to prevent them from going up and down the street?” Day remembers thinking. “Because you have to realize that anyone is going to hire them in two seconds if they walk out the door.”