Restaurant Job Trends
The restaurant industry has yet to fully recover its level of employment, despite private sector employment catching up to pre-pandemic levels last month.
Restaurants and bars picked up their pace of hiring in July, shaking off some economic and inflationary concerns. According to the BLS, food services and drinking places added 74,100 jobs in the month; they now employ 11.7 million workers. That remains over 600,000 workers short of where the industry was in February 2020, before shutdowns due to the pandemic led to mass layoffs. Average hourly earnings, meanwhile, fell for the first time since May 2020. In July, average hourly earnings for nonsupervisory leisure and hospitality workers declined by 0.16%. They remain more than 8% over where they were a year ago, but wage rates have moderated in recent months after soaring for much of the past two years. The economy added 528,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate fell slightly to 3.5%. The continued strong rate of job growth is likely to add to concerns about inflation, as competition for workers drives up wages and leads to higher prices. While wages in the restaurant industry have eased, many operators have been increasing menu prices to maintain margins as their costs have increased. The result will likely lead to higher interest rates as the U.S. Federal Reserve looks to slow inflation. Restaurants have been steadily adding jobs over the past year and a half as consumers have returned to typical rates of dining out and operators have brought back their workforces.
Industry sales trends are stable at lower levels.
OpenTable shows U.S. full-book restaurants were down ~(5%)-(10%) during the week of 5-Aug when compared to 2019, which represents a modest w/w decline, after being slightly positive over the weekend of 31-July when compared to 2019, which a slight w/w improvement.
Placer.Ai is showing similar trends.
SHORT COVERING
Short covering dominated last week's performance
Outperformers - OLO +22%, BYND +19% PTLO +19%, BROS +16%, WING +13%
Laggards - BRCC (6%), NDLS (6%), TKWY (5%), CHUY (5%), TAST (3%)
