The Tighter Labor Market Is Making Restaurants More Like Factories
Food-service operations were poised to surpass manufacturing in total employees—and then Covid hit. Now they’re transforming with smaller staffs and automation.
In 2017 food services and drinking places—government statistics lingo for restaurants and bars—were on the verge of overtaking manufacturers as an employer of Americans. In 1965 employment in manufacturing had been nine times that of food services, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, so the looming switch felt like a landmark in the not entirely salutary transformation of the country’s economy in the previous half-century. As the Atlantic summed up in a headline, “Restaurants Are the New Factories.”
A manufacturing mini-resurgence in 2018 put off that day of reckoning, but by February 2020 the restaurant-factory gap was down to about 424,400 jobs and seemed sure to disappear during the next recession, given that downturns tend to hit manufacturing much harder than food services.