Small businesses say their revenues are plummeting as they're forced to turn down business because of the labor shortage

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.

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.

>>"Yeah...there’s nothing to see here other than low pay? Keep it up and there won’t be any jobs and 20% interest rates."

Yep, that's what inflation does in its later stages. When currency debasement first starts up the economy grows and jobs are created - then comes the time to pay the piper. Inflation starts hitting both businesses and their employees on all sides and in the employees' case, they are unwilling to do the same job they were doing before for what is now effectively a lower wage. It really doesn't matter that inflation is also hitting businesses hard, if they can't or won't pay a worker enough to convince him or her to put in a day's labor then they won't have an employee.

Paying the inflationary piper will put a lot of businesses under (yeah, I remember the early 80's) and it sucks to be one of the no longer viable concerns but it is what it is and what it is is massive theft through currency debasement that everyone, employers and employees alike, is now paying for. Businesses can downsize by not paying high enough wages to attract employees and try to get by by focusing on their core operations and their most profitable customers or they can pay the ever higher wages, lose money and eventually go out of business. Tough times are here and people just might have to start walking their own dogs.

ps. if you need your dogs walked private message me, I do have a price for that kind of service. Grooming too.

>>"People demanding undeserved high wages is like Nixon’s wage-price control policy."

Well yeah, except one takes place in a free market among people free to choose who they do business with and under what terms and the other was fascism. But yeah, kind of the same thing.

>>"Yeah, we are so far in over our heads, basic economics means nothing."

Spoken like a true expert.

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