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Roslindale restaurant can't find staff for Sunday nights
By adamg on Sun, 10/23/2016 - 9:58am
Charlie Redd, of Redd's in Rozzie, explains why the restaurant is no longer open Sunday nights:
Due to current labor trends touching the entire Nation's restaurants, especially Boston’s, we find ourselves short-handed and unable to staff the service on Sunday night up to the standards you have come to expect from us. ...
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Comments
Housing crisis
This is a symptom of the housing and transportation crisis, not a freestanding labor shortage. People want to move here to work, but there is no housing affordable to service sector workers (among others). They might find affordable housing 30 miles away, but then the transportation time and cost is prohibitive, especially for lower paying jobs. We'll see more and more of this unless and until we improve both land use and transportation policy.
transportation time and cost
Perhaps worse on Sunday nights.
Raising wages eases labor shortages
It's within Redd's power to change this by paying employees more, assuming customers will pay extra when some of that cost is passed through (I'll admit Redd's has a much better idea of whether they will than I do). Also, if there really is a labor shortage, Redd's poaching employees from its competitors via higher wages would make its service look better by comparison.
So...
I guess you have no problem paying $35 for that burger so dish washers and burger flippers can live in those $3000/month apartments?
The facts don't bear this out
Know what the minimum wage for tipped staff is in MA? $2.63. Know what it is in California? $10. I was just in SF, the restaurants cost the same as in Boston, and the wait staff can bank on a steady paycheck.
MA ought to steadily increase the tipped minimum wage. If restaurant goers start tipping 10-15% instead of 15-20%, so be it.
Math challenge
Estimates of the labor portion of costs to run restaurants run as high as 35%. Assuming that high figure, and assuming that your burger starts out at $10, the labor portion of that price is $3.50, and all other costs are $6.50. For the burger to increase to $35, labor costs would have to increase to $28.50. That's for making one burger, not per hour.
More realistically, the restaurant could double everyone's pay, and the burger price would only go up to $13.50.
And people wouldn't buy it
If the owners thought they could sell just as many $13.50 burgers and come out ahead don't you think they would have already done that?
You can't just raise prices and expect to stay competitive forever. Maybe some people don't care but there's an economy of scale and if they lose 30% of their customers they are back to having problems.
It's also possible they just are not good managers and people don't want to stick around irrespective of the wages or they are spending way too much money on other expenses.
I wish people wouldn't think everything is as simple as "raise wages / raise prices". Taken to an extreme that's what's known as hyperinflation.
On the other hand
On the other hand, you can't underpay employees and expect to have enough workers to keep making burgers forever.
As for
No, I don't. If the owner thinks their competitors are paying their workers peanuts, they would be disinclined to pay their own in cashews.
Note that the 35% of costs is the very highest estimate of how much labor contributes to restaurant expenses. Those would be places that employ sommeliers and sous chefs, and probably already charge a lot more than $10 for whatever occupies the hamburger space on their menu. Fast-food places typically spend around 15% of their costs on labor. Their $3 burger would cost $3.45 if they doubled their payroll. $35 hamburgers are a fantasy.
Fair Enough
But Redd's already charges $14.95 for a burger. It's a damn fine burger. But will people pay $18.50 for one? Or will they walk two block where they can get one for $11?
Evicting working class folks
Evicting working class folks so
developers can tear down older and smaller affordable housing to build tall luxury buildings working class people can't afford in the name of density is not helping. Anti-nimby / pro-density supporters: are you paying attention? You've been had!
It Doesn't Work That Way
Have you seen what an older, lower density apartment in Roslindale [say one floor of a three decker] is going for these days? Keeping around out of date housing is not going to keep prices down. It makes them worse due to scarcity.
It doesn't work that way either
There's only so much you can expand the amount of housing here. Creating more housing doesn't reduce costs certain regions like this one. It hasn't here or in others.
Only so much?
We could double the amount of housing in Boston. We've got the land. I'm not arguing that we should, but there's plenty of opportunity to increase the amount of housing.
The problem for the Rozzie restaurant is that (a) working class housing is tough because the residents make too much for Affordable (tm) Housing, and too little to afford family housing near work, and (b) the MBTA simply can't be relied on by wait staff because it doesn't run late enough to get the staff home after work.
Steadily building more housing in Boston will help alleviate some of the housing pressure, and improving transportation options will help folks expand their housing options.
But in the short term, paying wait staff more than $2.63 an hour would certainly help attract more employees.
You don't have the land. It
You don't have the land. It's mostly built out. The people in less dense neighborhoods bought into those places as they were.
You also certainly don't have the transportation for that, and the cost of improving it is immense. Any suggesting about improving is ignored the costs. It's easy to talk about that, but building more in the meant time increases those challenges.
Unless you can create more housing than there is growth in demand, and you really can't in this type of region, than you aren't doing anything except creating other issues with more density in this area.
About 1/2
Of what plywood box ikea showrooms are going for.
So then you advocate for
So then you advocate for kicking out long term working class tenants regardless? I'm afraid I don't get your logic.
Housing doesn't become "out
Housing doesn't become "out of date" just because you think that there isn't enough of it built in a certain location.
Empty lots
Most stuff getting built is on empty lots. We have plenty more of them to fill up too, before a significant amount of existing housing is in danger.
That's bad, certainly. You
That's bad, certainly. You know what's worse? Rich assholes buying up existing buildings with lots of small affordable units and combining them into a few or even just one large "luxury" units. And there's no way to stop them. Indeed, zoning laws only encourage this sort of thing what with their restrictions on units per lot, per land area, per parking space, and so on.
What?
Where is this happening in Boston? The trend I've seen is developers buying up smaller buildings and putting in MORE units. Have you mistaken us for Wellesley, perhaps?
Downtown
This is happening frequently in Beacon Hill the South End and the Back Bay. People are buying up multiple condos in a brownstone and turning it back into a single family.
And it certainly happened in the South End
years ago with the SRO's being converted into luxury condos. But you could make the argument that it's all cyclical--those buildings were built as luxury single families and became affordable only when the neighborhoods fell on hard times. .
So they are restoring the
So they are restoring the brown stones back to their original purpose? Oh, the horror.
lol
i guess this guy thinks all the NOT ENOUGH PARKING SPOTS//THATS TOO MANY PARKING SPOTS! battles are for those notorious single family luxury dwellings
Shorthanded
At the wage they are willing to pay
Not always
I know a restaurant that pays $15 an hour plus tips and still can't find staff.
Maybe the owners want to maintain quality
but also have time off on Sunday.
They can only pay wages that
They can only pay wages that menu prices can sustain. Boston's meal tax to subsidize the convention center hurts small businesses.
True
But I also tend to have a hard time faulting small local businesses, since they're not the monopolies that tend to drive wages down and fight labor. A lot of time they simply aren't doing enough business to raise wages. Rock meet hard place.
It's hard to say here without knowing their finances, but yes they should raise wages if they can cut it. And we should stop by more if they do to support that community first commitment.
Perhaps some self reflection is needed.
Is it because no one wants to work on Sunday night or is it that no one wants to work for you, there on Sunday night? If things are good they will come.
The Pleasant is the Sunday
The Pleasant is the Sunday night place......
DIng Ding
Bulgingbuck for the win.
Less business, less drinking = lower tips on Sundays
It may be that staff don't find it worth working Sunday nights if they're making enough the rest of the week that they can spend Sundays with their families or getting some R&R.
Restaurants aren't as busy Sunday nights, and the diners are less likely to be doing heavy drinking, so staff will make less in tips.
Many of us can remember the days when it was hard to find anything other than a pizzeria or Chinese restaurant open on Sundays (and the Chinese restaurants would then be closed on Mondays). It's not a tragedy for a place to not be open 7 days/week.
Most of France is closed on
Most of France is closed on Sundays (and most of August as well) and it works just fine.
not uncommon
Restaurant staffing shortages have been increasing lately. It is not a matter of pay - per se'. Though all the reasons mentioned in other posts are contributing factors to the industry as a whole.
The Boston area has had a boom of restaurants over the last couple of years. There does not seem to be enough talented/qualified wait staff to go around.... Food Service blogs and sites have been mentioning staffing issues for awhile.
Staff
I definitely read about this in the Globe recently that there was a lack of talent. It takes a special server to know a detailed menu, open a wine bottle, etc. Its not like hiring for the 99.
Yes, and cook it too.
I could probably manage to wait tables in a half-assed kind of way at Redd's but trust me--you wouldn't want me cooking your food.
staff the service on Sunday
Weird, because every time I've been in there the service is sooooooo sloooooooow. I want to like that place, really, the food's great, but waiting constantly for water to be refilled or not getting the check for 20 minutes is a KILLER.
I love Charlie Redd, but
this is some seriously weasel-worded nonsense. Of course you can attract waitstaff on Sunday nights. You just can't attract them at the wage you're offering to pay them, which (because you didn't specify otherwise, and 100% would have mentioned it if you weren't) is $2.63/hour. You get away with it on other days because your patrons subsidize your labor costs by tipping, but it doesn't work on Sunday nights because of the reasons mentioned upthread. Meanwhile, I would imagine that you don't engender a lot of loyalty by paying a wage that says "I'd pay you even less if I could, but it's illegal."
Again: everyone who eats out pays the extra costs of staffing. You just quietly tip 15-25% of your bill to do it. That $10 burger is in fact a $12 burger by the time you subsidize the owner of the restaurant for his labor costs. Yet as soon as someone brings up the utter insanity of tipped-worker minimum wage, we hear cries of "socialism!" and "$35 burgers!" from the drown-the-gub'mint-in-the-bathtub crowd.
Why is everyone assuming that this is about waitstaff?
Did I miss something? Given--Sunday nights are tough after a long weekend but I'm guessing that it's kitchen staffing, especially the higher-level cook positions that are hard to fill. Any reasonably agile, charming doofus can wait tables but cooking at a place like that takes some skill and training--and youve got to give those folks at least one night off.
Yes, THIS ^. It's 100% about
Yes, THIS ^. It's 100% about kitchen staffing. There just is no one left to work. Everyone with a pulse has been snapped up by either a trendy new place or a chain in the Seaport.
Minimum Wage for Wait Staff
The $3.35 argument is flawed. Wait Staff must make minimum wage per hour (combined with tips) or their employer makes up the difference. (IE. Fred works 10 hours and gets no tips, Fred gets a check from his employer for $100 gross, not $33.50).
"Wait staff, service employees and service bartenders may be paid the service rate of $3.35 per hour if they regularly receive tips of more than $20 a month, and if their average hourly tips, when added to the service rate, are equal to or exceed the basic minimum wage. M.G.L. chapter 151, section 7."