Restaurant Worker Burnout

Restaurant worker burnout is real.

If you’ve seen The Bear, you know how anxiety-inducing working in the hospitality industry can be. While there are certainly more high-risk professions—emergency medical professionals and firefighters, police officers, pilots, air traffic controllers, etc.—restaurant jobs rank high among some of the most stressful and demanding.

As such, the restaurant industry saw an average turnover rate of 75% last year, per U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data—reaching a pandemic high of 132% in 2020.  Read: 3 out of every 4 employees straight quit their jobs. The stats gets worse for workers in the fast-food sector, hovering at 150% turnover, according to labor platform Landed.

Think about that for a moment. That means every employee in the industry leaves the job at some point. Of course, not every instance comes out of angst. More often than not, service industry jobs are stopgap, seasonal or stepping stones. Yet, such high turnover does beg the question: What makes the restaurant industry so transient? 

Sure, the ceiling for initial hiring is low—a bonus for newcomers, but quickly demoralizing to industry vets. With limited growth potential, lower salaries and a lack of clear upward mobility, what begins as a transitional post to better opportunity can slowly sink someone into a murky perception of their own worth—which could be a catalyst to throwing up the peace sign.

According to countless conversations with local restaurant owners and hospitality workers, extended working hours are a major factor. Most of the American workforce has a five-day/40-hour workweek—a far cry from the common 10- to 12-hour restaurant shifts extending over nights, weekends and holidays, especially for frontline employees like servers and cooks. Those long hours can lead to staff feeling hopeless, used or manipulated, especially when paired with ubiquitous complaints of being unappreciated and/or disrespected by both management and patrons.

Of course, not all patrons are rude or hostile—though almost all industry workers have encountered a Karen or two. There’s also the obnoxious, drunk, self-righteous—not to mention the Sallys who order like Meg Ryan from When Harry Met Sally (you know who you are)—all perpetuated by a culture of “the customer is always right.” Then there’s the tipping epidemic. Despite NC maintaining a meager hourly wage of $2.13/hour for servers since 1991, too many patrons still don’t see tipping as standard, or even necessary.

Imagine spending 10 hours a day, six days a week handling the needs and wants of complete strangers, barely making enough money for bills and receiving little to no support from your managers. Now, consider those strangers may or may not contribute positively to your daily earnings, purely for reasons beyond your immediate control. Perhaps the meal they ordered wasn’t what they were expecting. Maybe they felt there was too much ice in their drink, or the kitchen mixed up their order. All told, the 75% dropout rate suddenly doesn’t seem so shocking.

That employee burnout takes a toll on the industry as well, with front-of-house turnover costing restaurants upward of $6,000 per person. It’s an ugly truth that may make us all think twice the next time we dine out. 

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