Restaurant operators and workers across the U.S. are struggling to rebound from the pandemic, and are battered by a lack of staff, skyrocketing prices and supply shortages.
Paula Tejeda is one of them.
Even after mass vaccinations, customer traffic is “still very shaky,” Tejeda, the owner and founder of Chile Lindo, a deli and coffee shop in San Francisco, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
“The hospitality business, which is restaurants, small coffee shops and bars, are not back. We do not have enough foot traffic,” the business owner added.
The worldwide outbreak delivered a massive shock to the restaurant industry — which now employs one million fewer workers than in 2019 and has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 infections are threatening a new surge ahead of the winter: on Friday, news that Austria would reimpose a broad lockdown rattled investors, and fanned concerns about how the U.S. might be impacted if cases spike.
For the leisure industry, the recovery has been anything but smooth. Restaurant and bar sales were flat in October versus a month earlier, according to the Commerce Department’s latest retail sales data.
It signals the pressure the hospitality industry is under pressure from rising inflation, strict vaccination requirements, labor shortages and supply chain constraints — and the Delta variant surge that menaced the economy over the summer.
“We would have expected it to pick up but it hasn’t, I suspect it’s a sign that the recovery and branch from dining has kind of run its course,” Michael Pearce, Senior US economist at Capital Economics, told Yahoo Finance in an interview.
“The problem is that we know restaurant prices are going up, so we would have at least expected the nominal dollar value of spending at restaurants and bars increasing, the indication is that the trend is no longer going upwards,” the economist added.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
