Heading back towards the exit, here's another view of the floral department, penned in between produce and the self checkouts. I believe this is about the time that I started noticing large Now Hiring signs in almost every grocery store -- Safeway had been doing PA announcements about hiring since the start of COVID, but it seems like fall 2021 was when things started really ramping up in terms of desperation to hire people. It seems like things have gotten a little better by this point, but my local Safeway still has lots of signage, and even sign-up sheets for interviews, right in its entryway. It was already hard for low-paying jobs to attract workers in high-cost Seattle, but it's crazy how far that's gotten over the past few years.
The fast food places around here are the ones most desperately advertising job openings. I can't say that these places are so understaffed that they can't open because they seem to be open to me, but perhaps some of them are just getting by with skeleton staff sizes. I don't go to these places very often thanks in part to the decreased level of customer service at these places and subsequent long lines. Sometimes cooking at home is just less of a hassle...cheaper and healthier as well!
ReplyDeleteThat said, I did go to the In-And-Out Burger that opened up near me by Willowbrook Mall. They opened in 2020 I think, but I just hadn't gone there. The few times I was around there, it looked very busy. It was very busy when I went as well, but I just dealt with it this time, lol. I didn't really have any expectations, but I thought it was pretty good. The place was just way too busy and way too loud though. Just about every table was taken including the outside ones. Maybe that's just a summer thing though. The service was good and it was about as fast as one could expect given the busyness of the place. It's nice to see they had pre-Covid levels of service and they weren't making everyone order off an iPad or something. They even had some nice fake neon in the dining room. I'm not sure if I'll go there again if it's that busy, but In-And-Out seems to be doing well in Houston from what I can tell. Then again, Carl Jr's looked like it was doing okay for a while until the bottom fell out and they had to leave town!
As for staffing at supermarkets, I think things are okay around here. HEB and Randall's seem about as staffed as they always have been even pre-pandemic. Kroger is probably less staffed, but I think that's an intentional move by Kroger to only keep one or two lanes open. They were moving towards that even before the pandemic.
Yeah, fast food and restaurants seem to be having a lot of trouble here too, along with toms of other industries that don't pay all that well (construction, transit, all that stuff). And it doesn't help that, at least where I work, we still constantly have a good number of people out due to COVID (either sick or exposed)
DeleteInteresting to hear that! I'm not much of a fast food person, but I've certainly heard a lot of good things about In-N-Out -- which I didn't realize had expanded as gar as Texas!
Around here, Safeways already tended to be way understaffed prior to COVID (at least in the Seattle region -- ones in rural areas seem to generally be better staffed), but I've noticed that QFC and Fred Meyer seem to be having real staffing issues these days, to the point where they often don't even have enough staff to operate all of their self checkouts, let alone properly cover other parts of the store! Like you said, it's hard to say how much of that is due to COVID impacts versus intentional staffing cuts, but it's definitely a noticeable change over past years.