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.
March marks five years since COVID crept in and changed our lives as we know it. But—resilience or ruin?
It’s March 12.As Billie Eilish belted her last ballads to a packed house at PNC, an ominous threat crept across the globe. Flights were grounded. Events and activities were canceled. And in an unprecedented move, even the NCAA men’s and women’s hoops championship games were halted mid-dribble. Warnings to seek shelter and stay inside lit up phones and televisions. Except it wasn’t the menacing makings of a late winter snowstorm looming on the weather models. It was an invisible potentially apocalyptic assailant wreaking havoc on every aspect of life as we knew it.
As travel screeched to a halt and offices, schools, restaurants and so on shuttered to the public, Raleighites—and everyone around the world—locked ourselves inside. Before March 2020, the only Corona we knew was a cold brew in our hand with our toes in the sand— and, now, in a blink, the “coronavirus” was everywhere, both literally and figuratively. Epidemic, pandemic, COVID-19, quarantine, lockdown, isolation, “6 feet apart,” flattening the curve, doomscrolling and masks became buzzwords—dismal descriptors evoking the new normal.
Suddenly, “gather” had become a bad word, and the only way believed to truly protect yourself was to be by yourself—or at least in a bubble with otherwise uninfected family/peers. No commutes. No restaurants. No sports. No shopping. No in-person school or work. No hangouts. Even, for many, no—or at least interrupted—income. And, save a quarantine crew (if you were lucky enough to have one), no hugging; no touching—essentially no human contact. Utter isolation.
Meanwhile, as unemployment and sabbaticals soared locally and nationally—second only to the 1930s Great Depression and draft, etc.—essential workers were maxed out and stretched thin across health care, grocery, e-commerce and utility sectors and the like. “We worked 80-hour weeks most weeks,” recalls local grocery retail worker Anthony Husband. “I would experience COVID firsthand and miss over two weeks of work… almost three weeks of extraordinary weakness and loss of taste. It’s definitely something I’ll never forget.”
Frontline workers suited up daily in the face of an invisible existential threat. “When I was in [the Gulf] War, I was in an aircraft carrier and it was actually stressful in the same way,” remembers a bus driver somberly. “This was an enemy we really didn’t have a full understanding of.”
Filled to the brim and facing a crisis supply shortage, hospitals were relegated to war zones—“a medical war zone,” described an ER physician at the time. “What I see on a daily basis is pain, despair, suffering and health care disparities.” … But instead of mass hysteria, at least initially, the world was mostly quiet, an eerie silence interrupted in big cities only by window cheers at hospital shift changes—all echoing T.S. Eliot’s famed foreboding poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
LIVES LOST
Health care worker courtesy of The News & Observer
While the world didn’t end, the ripple effects would infect our reality forever. The virus would go on to take nearly 8 million lives* the world over according to the World Health Organization, with over 1.2 million of those in the U.S. alone per the CDC, and some ~29K here in NC.
In early 2020, nary a single living human had experienced a deadly pandemic of COVID’s caliber—the last being a century before with the 1918 Spanish flu that claimed upward of 50 million, with ~675K of those in the U.S. Across the next century, a handful comparably less hard-hitting other viruses were declared pandemics: the 1957 Asian and 1968 Hong Kong flus (each claiming ~1 mill lives globally, and ~100K U.S.), HIV/AIDS (1980s–current, ~42 million globally, nearly 800K in U.S.), and swine flu, pronounced a pandemic in 2009 before compromising nearly 300K lives the world over, with roughly ~12K in the U.S. As of press time, the bird flu has emerged with one death and 67 reported cases in the U.S.—with no human cases yet found in NC.
THE GREAT ISOLATION
Social distancing courtesy of The Embassy
The pandemic had a profound impact on the way we socialize and interact—period. A little like The Truman Show-meets-Her, life was lived almost chronically online. From Zooms to social media to online dating and virtual gatherings (even weddings), socializing through screens became the default.
Zoom surged upward from 10 million daily users in 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. —Zoom
From that digital pivot, deeper questions of solidarity emerged. “How could we continue to sustain community when we could not gather?” Dr. Jeff Roberts, senior pastor at Trinity Baptist Church, posed to RM at the one-year mark. “How could we continue to serve our community when our human resources were limited?”
As isolation became its own pandemic, the crave for community intensified. And with it came a level of solidarity, reflection, innovation and growth like none of us have seen or experienced in our lifetimes. Over that Twilight Zone-ish blip of total shutdown that simultaneously felt more like three—or three hundred—years than three months (not to mention eons of social distancing and altered norms), social priorities drastically shifted. Feed fiends traded doomscrolling for virtual (and later in-person) meetups and/or going outside and touching grass as a way to detox from social media—though, clearly, based on the recent TikTok tantrums, app addicts are so back.
That said, even today’s TikTok trotters are balancing digital and analog via uberpopular run clubs, dinner clubs, paddle sports (esp pickleball)—even mahjong—that continue to remain all the rage even at the five-year mark. And, after dating apps became a lifeline and Tinder soared to an all-time high in popularity, online dating, too, has jumped the shark, with singles craving in-real-life meetings more and more.
LOCKDOWN’S SILENT STRUGGLE
While the city—and world—continue to recover from COVID shifts (read: burnout, physical distancing, major life changes, loss), mental health ramifications remain rampant. The fallout from the struggle of juggling teaching your kids new math while taking Zoom calls, dealing with Instacart orders, meeting deadlines and having dinner on the table, all the while coping with very real economic, health and existential dread, living in utter loneliness or even financial ruin—even in some cases, serving as caregiver—continues to perpetuate feelings of despair, anxiety, burnout and exhaustion. Never mind what years of homeschooling, stalled social growth, missed milestones and benchmarks from birthdays to bar mitzvahs and beyond will do to an entire young generation—altogether altering the way we cope, connect and heal.
In the years that have lapsed since we first heard the word “coronavirus,” mental health has gone from public health crisis to full-on epidemic—one touching every age group and demographic. According to the NC Department of Health and Human Services’ most recent stats, while state rates are slightly lower than the U.S., suicide takes the lives of four North Carolinians per day—accounting for nearly 60% of violent deaths. These rates are far higher among males, spiking exponentially at age 85 and older, while female incidents peak for ages 45–54.
Topping the list of mental health concerns today, anxiety has been named as a major contributor to the escalation of these deaths, and in 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy deemed “loneliness, isolation and lack of connection in our country” a U.S. epidemic that has reached “crisis levels,” reporting a heartbreaking ~1 in 2 adults in America experience loneliness.
In the pandemic aftermath, the conversation surrounding mental health is mounting. While the outlook appears dire, in the very least, a shared experience has begun to destigmatize discussions around anxiety, depression and mental health while also normalizing therapy and making it more accessible via virtual options. Companies too—from corporate to small business to service industry and even health care—continue to invest in their people’s well-being, like with the implementation of Raleigh Police Department’s mental health crisis unit, ACORNS (Addressing Crises through Outreach, Referrals, Networking and Service). “We put some things in place so they know they’re supported within the police department,” then-Chief Estella Patterson tells RM.
REMOTE REVOLUTION
Besides maybe women joining the workforce, there isn’t one single human event in modern history—or really ever—that has arguably similarly impacted the way we work. Key word: human—aka notwithstanding computers and the advent of the internet, though all clearly magnanimous in their own right.
The Great Resignation (aka the Big Quit) was very real—and a very big deal. At its height, a whopping 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs each month. The seismic shift in where and how we work had widespread consequences on the commercial development sector, relegating many Central Business Districts—including Raleigh’s—to relative ghost towns. As priorities shifted, so too did the labor market, which, for Raleigh, led to a hypercompetitive job market as businesses adapted to attract and retain talent. A research and tech tour de force, Raleigh was serendipitously served opportunities that all but cemented the city as a global tech hub. The local innovation sector continued to thrive and expand as demand for skilled sect workers (think software development, cybersecurity and IT) skyrocketed, earning Raleigh a rank as best performing city in the nation this January and best place to start a business in 2025.
Even as vacancy rates surged, Raleigh has been—and remains—miles ahead of other large metropolises via brilliant business minds implementing strategies and spaces that promise to bring workers back to a new age of collaboration and efficiency. Prepandemic, the literal “bottom line” focus was typically on just that—the bottom line. But post-COVID, companies have a renewed focus on people—and smart spaces that prove it.
“Developers can go build these beautiful buildings and all these nice amenities, but you have to have leadership who are helping bring their teams along to see the bigger picture of how, when they come into the office and are moving around within the community and spending dollars, that is impacting making this a thriving, vibrant community everyone wants to be in.” — Kimarie Ankenbrand, Raleigh/Durham lead and managing director, JLL
For small businesses, the lockdown landscape often felt more like thrown hand grenades than fuel for growth, especially given Raleigh’s unique encounter with boarded businesses in the wake of Downtown riots. “The hardest thing I had to do was let my business go,” says now-defunct Art of Style owner Kendra Leonard, whose business was damaged in the riots. “I was on the brink of building my empire.”
Some, though, were able to pivot and survive, thanks in large part to a dose of inventiveness, necessity and Raleigh’s vast greenspace. “Trying to keep a business going during COVID is something my team and I will never forget,” says YoBa Studio founder and owner Sam Stillwell. “Trying to teach group fitness in masks, not being able to work out indoors—we rented a parking lot for a year and ended up buying a 42-foot RV… to host multiple classes every day. We are thankful to still be in business and starting to thrive again!”
Between 2019–21, the number of people working from home in Raleigh tripled—ranking among the highest of any U.S. large metro area —U.S. Census Bureau
EMPTY SEATS ERA
Perhaps nowhere was a pandemic pivot more obvious than the service industry. No in-person service for months (and for bars—a cataclysmic year) left Raleigh restaurants forced to let workers go or reduce hours (an epidemic of its own still putting immense pressure on the industry as dining demand returned to find a very real labor shortage) or shutter for good.
Without question, where you go—or can’t go—today is at the pride or peril of the pandemic. Mass closures quickly included classics and new faves alike, from Top Chef’s Katsuji Tanabe’s nationally acclaimed High Horse to DTR retro dance den Coglin’s—to name but a few. And the collateral damage continued for years, seeing establishments that fought the good fight hang up their aprons and shakers—including favorites like The Rockford, Clouds Brewing and Plates Neighborhood Kitchen.
But difficulty ignites inspiration, spurring such innovations as the takeout transformation and ghost kitchen era, Plexiglas dividers, flexible business models, creative event offerings (e.g. virtual cooking or cocktail classes), parklets, and QR codes. As part of the great bounce back, buzzy businesses aplenty were born: Raleigh’s most regal slice of restaurant real estate to date La Terrazza, 2023 Best New Bar Tap Yard Raleigh, 2024 Best Overall Bar Gussie’s, cafe craze The Optimist, Tanabe’s newest mutual endeavor Flour & Barrel, Trophy’s The Bend and second State of Beer, and on and on.
Now, restos and bars are as popular as ever—even surpassing prepandemic spending. According to Downtown Raleigh Alliance’s just-released State of Downtown report, food and beverage sales surged ~16% year over year and ~30% over 2019, with 27 newly opened storefront spaces in Q4 2024 alone, and 22 more to bow soon.
It’s a prophecy by David Meeker unfolding before our eyes: “I’m looking forward to DTR’s comeback story,” the Trophy Brewing, Elm Partners and Carpenter Development partner told RM at the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. “[2020] has been a hard year for Downtown with very few folks coming to work, no conventions and no weddings. The comeback story is going to be a good one.”
SURVIVAL STAGE
COVID, of course, doesn’t exist in a vacuum and has had an undeniably profound effect, from loss and lessons to lifeforce. But as far as survival stories go, Raleigh is serving a masterclass. Heralded as a region with remarkable economic, labor and social resilience, the Cap City has capitalized on its ideal position to survive and thrive in a postpandemic world.
Hugely attractive, Raleigh’s economic boon, jobs and comparably cheaper housing collectively catapulted it to one of the fastest-growing in the country. Add to that the city’s commitment to public health, small business support and a Downtown rebound, and Raleigh is looking to cling to its title as one of the most attractive metropolises bar none.
All told, as we reflect at the five-year mark, we’re reminded not just of our pain, frustration and loss—but how far we’ve come, realizing RM’s “Surviving the Year From Hell” 2021 manifestation: “Social distancing will come to an end. We will sit on bar stools again and dine indoors without inhibition. We will sway to live music. We will complain about all the people at fests and the NC State Fair. We will tailgate and fill the stands at Carter-Finley and PNC. And we will hug and high-five again.” And, as you told us, most importantly, “we will live with a level of gratitude and abandon we could have never discovered if not for this pandemic.” As far as what’s next, it’s perhaps best captured in Natasha Beddingfield’s viral lyric, “the rest is still unwritten.”
See an empty table and not getting seated? Here’s why.
In 16 years, Marcus Hall has never put up a “now hiring” sign. Until now. With staffing levels over 20% below normal at more than 50% of restaurants throughout the country, according to the National Restaurant Association, Hall is not alone.
“It’s been 15 months of total beatdown and a brutal battle,” says Hall, owner of The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar in North Hills. “Survive and advance. Keep on fighting, keep on swinging and keep on hiring. You can’t run the business without people. They are our most valued resource and always have been.”
Hall is trudging through an unheard-of glitch in hiring, where he may interview 20 candidates and only one will show up for orientation. The bodies are just not there, and scheduling is nearly impossible.
“You get up, look at your schedule and hope you have enough people that day,” says Hall. “We’re trying to create a fun work environment just like we always have, but it’s taxing when you have this mentality that creeps in, wondering if this employee is going to show back up tomorrow.”
A lack of staff makes service difficult. Patrons often go to restaurants and see open tables and don’t understand why they can’t sit down. It’s not because the owners don’t want the business—it’s because they don’t have the staff to take care of a full house.
“The restaurant operator doesn’t want to turn away business,” says Hall. “The last thing I want is a guest to come in, sit down and overwhelm the restaurant—and then have a bad experience. This is the time where if people really want to help local businesses survive, come out and support, but also come out and understand.”
So where did all of the workers go? That question is plaguing restaurant owners and there doesn’t seem to be a solid answer.
“I think the issue with hiring is, all of the sudden, this entire industry reopened, and we all went to hire people at the same time,” says so•ca and kō•än owner Sean Degnan, who says about 30% of his staff are new hires after shutting his doors twice since last March.
This basically makes the restaurant business a job-seeker’s market because positions are plentiful. Those who were not in it for the long haul may not be willing to go back through the up-and-down yo-yo that the business has been experiencing. Some restaurants, like so•ca and kō•än, are changing their model to entice workers back.
“We came back and we had a little staff retreat about how to reopen in a pandemic, and we talked about all of the things that would require,” says Degnan. “The first was paid time off if you were feeling ill. The next is that we need to start paying a living wage to everybody.”
Degnan has joined other local restaurants in working a living wage into his business model. By paying nontipped staff $15 per hour and changing the tipped base rate to a minimum of $7.25 per hour (versus the industry standard of $2.13 per hour), workers have more of an incentive to stay.
For Phoebe (name changed for anonymity), who works at a tip-sharing restaurant, it’s the tips at her high-volume location that keep her there. As a 26YO who is no longer eligible for her parents’ health insurance, part-time restaurant work does not offer her a safety net.
“For most people, the restaurant industry isn’t the end goal,” says Phoebe, who’s been in the business since she was 16. “I would love to get out of the restaurant industry, but it’s the most consistent work right now. I would take any job if it came with [health insurance].”
Recently, Phoebe has been witnessing something a lot of restaurants have been experiencing—a tremendous turnover rate. “We used to never have a problem with turnover, and most of us have been there three to four years, but, lately, it’s new people every week and people quitting every week,” she says. “We keep having people come in to train for a week. I guess everyone’s gotten used to not working as much, so having to do a lot of work seems not really worth it.”
So what are the reasons to leave the business? Some are afraid to go back into the tight space of a kitchen. Some have childcare issues. And some changed their careers altogether, using this time to pivot in a new direction or embrace something they had done only part-time before.
Kevin Callaghan, who owns Acme Food & Beverage Co. and Heyday Brewing in Raleigh—says he’s had a number of people who have worked for him for years who were always half in, half out.
“They were always in the restaurant industry making a living, but they were always working toward another goal,” says Callaghan. “I think a lot of people jumped into other kinds of roles because they needed to make a living. Most of our staff were making a good living, but couldn’t just sit on the sidelines.”
Callaghan, who also pays a living wage, says that the struggle to find new people is partly caused by the lack of stability the restaurant has had recently. People don’t want to be concerned about whether their paycheck will clear, which is a big fear.
“Once restaurants really stabilize, people will move more energetically back to the business,” says Callaghan. “Because we’re paying a higher wage, I think it’s been simpler for us to be able to recruit people who want to work.”
The amount of “green” workers is also an issue, with restaurants forced to take in so many employees with little or no experience. Restaurants can’t flip a switch and go 100 mph in half of a second. Employees need to be trained, and that takes time.
“We’re all, as businesses, struggling with the growing pains of growing the business back to what it was before,” says Callaghan. “It’s the way I imagine a garden in spring. We had an industry that was in full flower—COVID was the wintertime for the industry and now everything is growing back. It’s a growing pain we all really dislike, but it’s very real.”
WEB EXCLUSIVE Did you know that if someone dines and dashes at a restaurant (yep, people really do that in real life), the server likely incurs the cost? As if servers don’t have enough to worry about already.
We recently saw a post on Facebook from a local server who, when she realized one of her tables left a fake check, was forced to pick up the bill. It got us thinking, should that kind of responsibility really be left to the server?
First of all, dining and dashing is illegal. If you ordered food from a restaurant and didn’t pay for it, you’ve essentially stolen from the restaurant, and the restaurant has the right to press charges against you. Also, it’s totally not cool.
Naturally, we reached out to our resident Restaurant Guru and co-host/producer of the North Carolina Food & Beverage Podcast, Max Trujillo, for his thoughts on the topic. Trujillo personally feels that no establishment should ask its service team to cover any kind of dine-and-dash. “Anything else would be bad business,” he says.
As a former server myself, I’d have to agree. Ultimately, dining and dashing really hurts the person who is likely making the least amount of money—and having a server take on that kind of burden doesn’t seem very fair. Moreover, why does the burden fall on the server (who likely has no idea they’re being scammed)? I couldn’t imagine taking on a large table’s $200-plus tab when I was serving in college—I would’ve had to work twice as many hours in the next week alone just to make up for what someone else stole!
Surely, in instances such as these, the restaurant can comp the bill themselves—and hopefully find a way of figuring out whoever it was that scammed them. Trujillo says it’s more common for a restaurant to ask a server to pay the cost of a food or drink item that was caused by server error—a far cheaper bill—usually due to that server repeatedly making clerical errors in ringing the wrong items into the kitchen. (Happens to the best of us.)
Understood, but Trujillo also doesn’t think a restaurant has the power to enforce such a rule. “Just asking a teammate to pay creates an uncomfortable work environment,” he says.
According to USA Today human resources expert Johnny C. Taylor Jr., under federal wage-and-hour law, a restaurant is technically allowed to require an employee to foot the bill from a dine-and-dash “if it does not cause the employee’s wages to dip below the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour for nonexempt employees.” However, in some states (such as New York and California), employers are prohibited from deducting an employee’s paycheck for business losses—as it should be…
At the end of the day, servers depend on tips from customers to make (or supplement) their living. Anyone with service industry experience knows how demanding the job is—physically, mentally and emotionally. On an average busy shift, servers are required to employ mad multitasking skills (think patient satisfaction, educating patrons on various menu items and specials, innumerable orders, delivering food and drinks in a timely matter, general back-of-house upkeep, managing co-staff stress and patron personalities—all while running around (literally: the going average per shift is reported at 5 miles)… not to mention relying on making money from tips (or lack thereof).
All in all, there’s more to the restaurant business than meets the eye. You never know what a server is going through—personally or at work—so it’s best to always treat them with respect and kindness (you don’t want to be the jerk that ruins their day). Be nice, smile and always pay your bill—and leave a good tip!
