Posted on 10/25/2021 2:51:39 AM PDT by EBH
Laughing Pets, a pet-sitting and dog-walking company in Atlanta, Georgia, turned down a holiday job worth around $2,500 because it couldn't find enough staff.
"We get, on average, four new inquiries per day and we have to turn all of them away," its owner Karen Levy told Insider.
She said that she used to hire 12 members of staff, which has fallen to just five. As well as turning away prospective customers, she'd had to suspend some visits to long-term clients, too.
"I may never get those clients back," Levy said, adding that she was even grateful for cancellations because it meant her remaining staff wouldn't get burned out.
Levy isn't alone. Other businesses small across the US have also resorted to dramatically slashing their opening hours or cutting back on their services – both because they can't find enough staff to operate as usual and because labor is getting more expensive. Nearly a quarter of small and medium-sized businesses said in a poll by Alignable they'd reduced operating hours to cut payroll expenses.
At Maid to Sparkle, a residential cleaning service in Richmond, Virginia, the workforce has fallen by roughly half, according to owner Jonathan Bergstein.
As a result, the company is cleaning between 15 and 20 houses a day, down from 30 pre-pandemic, he said.
He said that he had to turn down business and reschedule loyal customers, who he feared he could lose to a competitor.
Before the pandemic, Maid to Sparkle made around $750,000 a year in gross profit, Bergstein said.
"Now we'll be lucky if we gross maybe $300,000," he said.
Debra Marsteller is the CEO of Project Independence, a medium-sized nonprofit in California that works with adults with developmental disabilities. She said that the organization had lost around 30% of its staff.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
And from an economics standpoint we are seeing inflation and being loudly warned about hyper-inflation.
I would tell the economic gurus to pay attention over here, there is a contraction happening in the market. One the size we have not experienced before. And it is going to get much, much worse the spiral has already started.
Not sure I completely follow that. Basically, "I can't find people to hire, so I'm losing business, but my competition has a full staff and they will manage to lure my customers away." How does that work? Maybe it's about wages?
And if you are doing well the covid Nazis will make sure you dont
It’s ALLL about wages. I still get emails of IT places offering $11/hr. Nobody’s going to want to take that. No sympathy for these cheapasses.
Workers can’t afford to GO to work.
* Transportation
* gasoline Fuel
* Insurance
* Transportation cost purchase
* Transportation maintenance
* distance/mileage
* housing expenditure employment compensation ratios
* vax health threats
❎❎❎
People will call to schedule service. If one service is full, they keep calling around until they find someone with an opening.
As I have told many in my niche though...raise your rates. People who offer ‘services only’ for whatever reason are loathe to raise rates on existing clients.
I know Karen Levy in the article who runs the pet sitting/dog walking business. Dog walking is a volume based business model. The business has to turn a certain volume in order to be profitable and pay decent wages. If the business is understaffed it is losing money. Notice, I said pay decent wages. Most pet sitting companies right now are offering $12-15 per visit plus tips/bonuses. Price of dog walks is $20 for a 20 minute walk. Walker needs to do a minimum of 2 walks per hour. That’s a wage of $24-$30 per hour. Plus tips! Puppy kisses and fresh air. But the model is based on volume. If people won’t walk dogs for 24-30 per hour they are losing money.
Relax, help is on the way. As I write this the Biden administration is bringing in millions of low-skill low-wage workers to do the jobs Americans won't do. It's good to have a POTUS who cares, at least about everyone that isn't American.
they won’t work either ...they get government handouts.
plus my concern here is we are seeing a contraction in business that no one is talking about
the focus is on the labor shortage and wages, yet everyone I know has raised wages and yet the problem persists
Economic experts are now saying wages are not the problem and are trying to determine what the underlying issue really is?
It’s about wages IMO. There is a pre-covid mentality that has to be adjusted to meet what the labor market wants.
1- higher wages. You can’t pay someone a few dollars above minimum. It costs twice as much to make a bologna sandwich and fill their cars up with gas now than it did two years ago.
2- work from home. Every employer that can feasibly have people work from home, should. They need to make accommodations in this area. Naturally, there are jobs that need to be onsite but the ‘rona has shown that most white collar work can be done remotely.
Employers need to adjust and hanging out a help wanted sign isn’t enough. Even if it means reducing the services because labor costs more, it needs to be done. It will hurt small businesses, but it is what it is.
Our area has two tech giants paying people competitive wages and they’re drawing all the manual labor talent.
Industries go through this every 10-12 years.
There is no such thing as labor shortage. The real problem is a WAGE shortage.
How can small business afford not to open and pay people enough to show up? Me thinks they are sitting on a lot of personal wealth...
Mr. Anti-Labor strikes again.
Duh.
I agree they won’t take $11 per hour, they can go walk dogs for much more than that! LOL.
For 50 years baby boomers have been supply high quality relatively cheap abundant labor to the USA business machine. Now they are retiring en masse ( a lot of them a little early due to COVID scamdemic ) and because of that it is now a sellers market for labor. This is about time. Glad to see it.
Quality of life is part of it... extra money in a family is suppose to bring extra happiness. Turncs out that’s not as true as people thought.
Companies in the past were loyal to employees - that’s not the case today. Companies will go with whoever is cheapest - illegals, foreigners, whoever rocks their bottom line.
That matters.
Feeling a large chunk of your life is spent for the benefit of people who don’t give a damn about you is rough. Pearls before swine as they say... Ask police officers who offer up their lives for cities that fire them if they don’t get jabbed. Talk about zero loyalty. It’s the same, but not as dramatic down the line wit other businesses.
Similar to when conservatives realized we didn’t matter to the Never Trumper/Bush type ‘elites’... That no matter how often we voted for them - they would never be loyal back.
Right; one of my children left a crappy restaurant job after a year because the boss was incompetent (and the minimum wage here in NJ is $12/hour). The place was just run poorly, and how many times can you ask students with homework and school the next day to stay for another 6-hour shift because crappy workers don’t show up? A security guard friend described the same exact dynamic (and reason for leaving); there are too few WASPs left in NJ to do jobs right (full disclosure: I’m not a WASP).
I think in some cases the problem may be that there simply aren’t enough people in existence to fill all the open positions. In my area it seems obvious that many of the industries are competing for the same low-skill, entry-level labor. Restaurants can’t find staff because Walmart hired them all … then they left Walmart to go work for Amazon … etc., etc.
Notice how in the entire article there was a single reference to wages, how one employer had been 'forced' to increase them.
You point out a fact that I almost never hear anyone mention; going to work is not cheap......it costs money.
(Merely a personal observation)
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