Dammit. Another good restaurant closing. What’s going on?? In the article on WRAL they say they are “closing for reasons you can imagine and for some that have us scratching our heads”. These places never actually say explicitly why they’re closing. I mean bottom line it’s because they can’t make enough money but I wonder why that’s the case when restaurants appear to be busy and you can barely get a reservation at the good spots. I’m guessing that being unable to hire staff has something to do with it.
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A WH on South Glenwood would kill it.
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Raleigh Times used to be a money loser in its first several years or so even though it was packed, and then they hired a cost-conscious business manager and the place has been printing ever since. Not saying that’s the case for all of these that are closing, but sometimes appearances can be deceiving if you don’t have a pro watching the bottom line closely and making those hard decisions, especially in the food business with lower margins.
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mmm, not necessarily. My father-in-law owns restaurants, and between him and the news I hear about DTR service industry i.e. C Grace, the state of the labor market right now is extremely difficult to manage, and I’m sure some profitable restaurant owners are just fed up with turnover, theft, toxic staff, etc. I’ve heard multiple stories recently of servers funneling cash out of restaurants for months and months before being caught. Customer pays cash, server deletes sale out of computer system, food gets wasted in inventory system, and poof server walks out with stolen cash and restaurant owner raises menu prices thinking they are just having higher waste factors. I can imagine after dealing with this for years, you just close down out of choice.
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Their full message alludes to not weathering closures very well. They seemed busy the times I’ve been there, but that was usually on a Saturday night. No clue how it fared on other days.
Also bu ku moved to Wake Forest but maybe it’s closed now?
As long as immigration remains low, and as long as we have a powerful anti-immigrant sentiment running through the country, expect the labor market to remain tight.
As a country, immigration has always played a key role in the growth of our economy and expansion. Without immigration, and coupled with an aging population, we are basically screwed.
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Happy to report that my future Brother-in-Law will officially be immigrating to the US in October (Fiance Visa paperwork almost complete! What a long, drawn-out and tedious process - Spain is even less helpful than the US when it comes to this) - however, he already works for himself as a web developer and will simply continue working for his clients from here. So that won’t help the labor market!!! 
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Is it really low? This is just legal immigration numbers.
| Decade | Average per year |
|---|---|
| 1890–99 | 369,100 |
| 1900–09 | 745,100 |
| 1910–19 | 634,400 |
| 1920–29 | 429,600 |
| 1930–39 | 69,900 |
| 1940–49 | 85,700 |
| 1950–59 | 249,900 |
| 1960–69 | 321,400 |
| 1970–79 | 424,800 |
| 1980–89 | 624,400 |
| 1990–99 | 977,500 |
| 2000–09 | 1,029,900 |
| 2010–19 | 1,063,300 |
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When accounting for percentage of population, it’s definitely low. And it’s only gotten worse in the three years since your chart ends.
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This goes both ways. Have heard from servers that the owners/managers are raising prices and their own salaries but only incrementally (if at all) raising everyone else’s salaries. Some owners may not have been very good at managing and taking care of their workers and see things like this as a result. Or blame employees, gov, etc for their own bad decisions, meanwhile solidly run businesses are better positioned to navigate tighter margins…it how our system “works”. People still pay in cash? 
Covid Pandemic is the most likely culprit seeing as those three years starts in 2020.
"U.S. employers say it’s a hard time to find and keep talent. Workers are decamping at near-record rates, while millions of open jobs go unfilled. One reason for this labor crunch that has largely flown beneath the radar: Immigration to the U.S. is plummeting, a shift with potentially enormous long-term implications for the job market.
In the middle of the last decade, the U.S. was adding about 1 million immigrants a year. But those numbers, which slowed down during the Trump administration, hit a brick wall when COVID-19 erupted in 2020.
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Not particularly accurate: All these are pretty close to the average for the decade:
1,051,031 1915
1,183,505 1916
1,127,167 1917
1,096,611 1918
1,031,765 1919
JP Morgan is off? 1) the numbers are lower now 2) especially compared to the rate of growth. Just because a number hasn’t dropped too significantly (in your view) that doesn’t mean it’s kept pace.
I am merely posting actual numbers. Not putting any bias into it. Take out of it what you want or not.
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For sure, and I think successful restaurant owners/managers do a good job of building a positive culture throughout the staff and create a true cohesiveness within the team that weeds out the bad apples.
However, has anyone else noticed that more and more places are charging “living wage” fees, and suggesting tip ranges that start at 20%, and go up to 30%? And considering that tips are the main source of income for servers/bartenders, and it’s a percentage of menu prices, I would suspect that most in the service industry are making proportionately the same as before inflation. Of course, some people don’t tip well, and that really irks me. As weird as it may be, tipping is the system we have - honor it, or cook at home!
But yeah, I think a lot of restaurants are closing because of labor issues primarily, among other factors. Unfortunately, due-respect is not a forte of the younger generation. What used to be common courtesy, like calling ahead and saying you won’t be showing up to the job interview, or telling your boss you’re quitting, isn’t exactly happening anymore in the restaurant industry.
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Excellent news! My wife is a Canadian immigrant, and getting her into the country legally was beyond frustrating. The interview agent in B.C actually made her cry. I am happy to hear your brother-in-law survived the gauntlet of INS bureaucracy!!
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Those are some nice WW1 numbers. 
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The pandemic only accelerated what was a slowly declining immigration rate since peaking in 2016. Hmmm…I wonder what happened to cause this after 2016? We all know about the pandemic but what else happened? I can’t put my finger on it. 
The peak immigration year in the USA was 1907 with 1.3M immigrants. To put that in perspective, that 1.3M was against a USA population of 87M. The US population is nearly 4X that today yet the # of immigrants is now lower than 1.3M annually.
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Lol. Maybe you should analyze the numbers differently. The Trump 3 years in that decade he averaged 1,085,081 per year. In the 7 years prior for the first part of that decade, the average was 1,053,922 per year. Again these are just the numbers. No bias. Take what you want out of it.
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