“Kitchen Confidential”: Restaurant Workers Reveal Industry Secrets In 30 Posts (New Pics)

The restaurant and food service industry is expected to continue to grow in 2024. Experts predict that it’s going to reach a profit of $1 trillion for the first time and create 200,000 job positions, pushing the total number of industry workers to almost 16 million people. 

However, such impressive growth comes with a price, unfortunately, mostly for employees. And the high turnover in the food industry proves this. Data shows a staggering rise in this rate of around 75% - a number that has been growing since the pandemic. This percentage is more than one and a half times higher compared to other sectors. 

Because of such high turnover, restaurant owners said that recruiting and retaining employees were among their top business challenges in 2023.

Chances are, you’re now wondering why so many workers are leaving positions in this sector. Well, ironically, one of the main reasons is that businesses are short-staffed. 

A 2022 survey has found that 90% of food service employees have worked overtime, double shifts, or extra ones. Of those, 75% said they had to do so because of a lack of staff.

Bruce Tracey, a professor of HR management at Cornell, commented on workers' dissatisfaction with the industry, saying, “Hospitality jobs, especially front-line, are notoriously known for low-wage, low-skill kinds of work — it’s associated with working conditions that are not necessarily conducive to adequate life-work balance.”

Another factor contributing to high turnover is low pay. The effort to provide higher wages is there. However, it doesn’t seem to be enough. In the last few years, wages have driven up by 23%, and at the end of 2022, the minimum hourly pay was $17.30, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unpredictable hours also add to the fact that people are leaving. A 2021 report found that 64% of workers received their schedule with less than two weeks' notice, more than a third had one week of heads-up, and a quarter said they had only 72 hours’ notice.

“For an hourly worker, their pay is determined not just by their wage, but by the number of hours,” Kristen Harknett, co-founder of The Shift Project, comments. “You can’t create better conditions for workers by only having the one side of the equation.” 

Additional challenges for restaurant industry workers include poor communication, physically demanding tasks, and difficult customers.