UPDATED: MetroWest Businesses Struggling To Find Staff & Stay Open

By Grace Mayer

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FRAMINGHAM – Owner of Doragon Ramen and Doragon Provisions in Ashland Alan MacIntosh was spending his Friday zigzagging from Milford to Needham to Chelsea in pursuit of takeout containers for his restaurant. The containers were in short supply.

So were the staff members at the restaurant depots he was darting to and from.

After securing containers on his third attempt, MacIntosh waited in line for an hour to check-out due to staffing shortages. 

While two solitary registers cycled through customer after customer, MacIntosh was fenced-in by other restaurant and business owners who were struggling under the weight of countless job listings for employees who were nowhere to be found.

At this point in the pandemic, Doragon Ramen had been pushed to its limits, especially after having exhausted its efforts to attract new employees.

“It’s not just restaurants. Banks and everybody else, nobody can find staff,” MacIntosh said. “Businesses are closing because they cannot staff, not because they can’t get customers.” 

But the staffing shortages at the restaurant depot looked pretty similar to Doragon Ramen’s situation.

After working in the restaurant industry for nearly 20 years, MacIntosh, who opened Doragon Ramen in 2018, said he’s noticed that hiring employees has become not just a challenge but an impossibility.

Despite countless job openings and over nine million people jobless to fill them, businesses are struggling to attract new employees. 

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Instead of returning to work, MetroWest Chamber CEO Jim Giammarinaro said workers may be falling back on extended unemployment benefits and searching for higher-paying jobs instead. Another factor may be that in two-parent households, one parent could have refrained from returning to work to take on additional childcare responsibilities, Giammarinaro said.

“Small retailers, small businesses, they’re not going anywhere else. If they can’t make it in their physical location, they’re just going to shut down,” Giammarinaro said.

Giammarinaro said 36% of businesses and small businesses in Massachusetts closed this past year, with hospitality businesses, including hotels and restaurants, being the primary sector impacted. Other industries most impacted during the pandemic included recreation, transportation, and retail sectors, Giammarinaro said, all of which are struggling to hire employees. 

“These companies, if they want to attract new employees, need a vibrant hospitality center. Our downtown needs to be thriving,” Giammarinaro said of MetroWest. “…. That can’t happen unless people come back to work.”

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Like many businesses, MacIntosh has posted job listings on Indeed and Facebook. But even after working 90 hours per week and spending thousands on boosting job ads, MacIntosh said he still hasn’t been able to attract full-time employees to his restaurant. He had to stop serving lunch due to understaffing, and he previously cut down his operations from six days a week to five. 

“What are we supposed to do?” MacIntosh said. “I fear we’re practically losing money every day at this point.” 

He said the problem isn’t the customers. His restaurant’s sales actually increased this past year from takeout orders. The problem, he said, is the availability of jobs and no one clamoring to fill them. 

Mo Bentley, General Manager of the Jack’s Abby Beer Hall, a brewery and restaurant in Framingham, said finding staff has been the biggest challenge the restaurant has faced while emerging from the pandemic.

While Jack’s Abby has been trying to meet customer demand, there have been weeks where the restaurant has had to limit capacity or close seating areas due to staffing shortages. Servers and cooks have also had to help clean up after closing, because the restaurant is short on kitchen staff.

“Our current staff is dedicated, strong, and motivated. They’re also burnt out. They’re working overtime and everyone is tired. We want our guests to have an amazing experience with us but it’s hard to justify it at the expense of our staff,” Bentley said to SOURCE.

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While Bentley said Jack’s Abby was able to operate with a nearly full staff during the summer, the restaurant will lose about 45% of that staff, who were primarily college students. Bentley said the restaurant has added sign-on and referral bonuses to increase their candidate pool. 

In Marlborough, Apex Entertainment, a multi-use meeting, arcade, and dining space, has also struggled to attract employees during the pandemic.

In addition to posting openings on online job boards, including Indeed, Rob Luzzi, Director of Field Marketing of RA Ventures Hospitality Group, which Apex Entertainment falls under, said the company has hosted three jobs fairs this past spring to draw in employees. 

Luzzi said the company has even used some of its radio station spots, normally used to promote Apex events, to advertise jobs. Despite these efforts, Luzzi said Apex has still not returned to pre-pandemic staffing levels.

Although staffing may be down, Luzzi said Apex has noticed a gradual uptick in business, especially on the weekends.

“Between the job fairs and the advertising and the different campaigns we’ve done, we’ve certainly tried [to attract employees], and we never had to do any of these steps before,” Luiz said. 

After closing from March through June in 2020, the Marlborough Apex location reopened in July. But being short-handed, Apex cut down operations from seven days a week to five, remaining closed on Monday and Tuesday.

At the end of July 2021, Apex opened up six days a week and remained closed on Mondays. Luzzi said he believes the staffing challenges are largely due to the pandemic’s unemployment benefits. 

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“For a lot of the hourly positions for the servers and the bartenders, they have a less hourly wage because they get more tips. When your business doesn’t work [like] that, they’re not getting the tips. They make more money staying on unemployment, so it’s hard to blame them for it,” Luzzi said. 

Deborah Minori, Director of Human Resources at the MetroWest YMCA, said while the recreation center is still operating seven days a week, their team has also struggled to hire new employees during this time, in part because Minori said YMCA employees can’t work fully remotely.

Minori said while members are returning, the gym has not fully returned to where YMCA membership was at pre-pandemic.

“There’s no crystal ball for us to see what’s going to happen this fall,” Minori said. “We’re obviously concerned about the Delta variant… So that is a concern for us to make sure we’re keeping everybody safe.”

Now, with the Delta variant leading to a rise in COVID-19 cases, this could pose additional problems for businesses in the fall.

As the summer nears its end, Macintosh is currently working on re-planning a new menu for Doragon Ramen to accommodate staffing shortages.

For MacIntosh, the lack of workers is where the problems only begin.

While he’s raised wages at his restaurant to retain his dwindling staff, the increasing costs of supplies and food are additional factors that loom over MacIntosh’s restaurant—along with the uncertainty surrounding the Delta variant. 

“As long as people keep pretending nothing’s happening, then nothing’s going to get better,” MacIntosh said. “That’s going to be the death of business, because the restaurants in Massachusetts, we can’t weather another shutdown,”

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Grace Mayer was a 2021 SOURCE summer intern. This was her last assignment for SOURCE. She is a student at Boston College.