My wife and I and another couple went to the horse races a few Fridays ago, and stayed until 9:45 or so. There's a Jim's restaurant (San Antonio fixture, family-owned local chain, similar to IHOP or Denny's) near the track, and it's been a tradition for us to go there after leaving the races. They were closing the doors as we arrived at 10pm. They USED to be an all-night breakfast place. So, we loaded back into the truck and headed to an IHOP not far away. It was ALSO closed, and it used to be 24 hrs, too. We wound up going to Chili's, which was open.
Covid definitely changed the restaurant landscape forever. Once the mandates were lifted, I made a point of never wearing a mask again, even if I was the only one in a place that wasn't. There were many times in the first month or so that I was. Or, I would see one other person without, and I would give them a thumbs up or a wink. There was definitely a reluctance on the part of some to venture back out into public. Once restaurants started re-opening (and/or putting all the tables back in) we made a point of patronizing them. They had HELL staffing up. We would often see a place with a long wait AND empty tables. We asked, and they had sections closed because they just didn't have, and couldn't get, servers. We'd talk to our waitstaff, and they would tell us none of their peers were coming back to work. There were lots of reasons. The first, and temporary reason, was the increased availability of unemployment. That ran out and stopped being a factor, though. Some servers realized they were able to economize and get by on one salary, especially by eliminating day-care costs - i.e. they became stay at home parents. Some had moved back in with Mom and Dad.
That was pretty much the extent of what we heard, and we chalked it up to those reasons. "It" was the lack of servers across the board, and the lack of good/experienced servers, in particular.
Last summer, it was a bartender in Prague that turned me on to what I now think is the overriding reason. (The above are all still valid, but I think this makes more sense for the severity of the problem.) My wife and I were the only ones in this place in the early afternoon, so we had the bartender to ourselves. Being in a different country, we really wanted to talk to as many people as possible to maximize the experience. This guy was an American or Canadian ex-pat living over there. We bemoaned the lack of servers returning to work and he explained his view of it. He said he had lots of friends (both in Czech Republic and "back home" ) that had been servers for many years and really hadn't given a lot of thought to getting out of the industry. OR, they HAD thought about it, but just hadn't gotten around to doing anything about it. Once the Pandemic and the shut-downs hit, they were cut off from their livelihood. Some were able to wait it out and some weren't, or weren't inclined to. There are SO MANY ways to make money these days working remotely. Many of them found one of those jobs, and found that they liked it. Better pay, better schedules, less a-hole customers, and a host of "first order" reasons enticed them to stay and not return to serving. But one factor outweighed the rest for many... these jobs were WAY less fragile than waiting tables. By that, I mean there's little to no chance that they will be cut off from their livelihood again by another pandemic. If Covid 2 or airborne Ebola or whatever crops up, they'll still be able to sell insurance or edit web pages from home.
Wait staff has already lived thru a SHTF scenario and have taken off with their bug-out bags to other industries.
