As March drew to a close, Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor in the Strip District found itself without enough workers for the upcoming spring and summer rush, and it certainly did not have enough workers to open the shop to its desired seven days a week schedule.Any time I think about the math for hospitality jobs, it makes no sense that an extra few bucks an hour for labor (one of many inputs) is going to put all these places out of business.Then, on March 30, the parlor announced it would more than double the starting wage for the roles, going from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, a scoop that seemed to captivate workers throughout the region and one that earned a significant amount of local media coverage.
"It was instant, overnight. We got thousands of applications that poured in," Maya Johnson, general manager of Klavon's, said. "It was very overwhelming, very. People were coming in by the next day that it broke on the news, they were coming in, filling out paper applications. I was doing on-the-spot interviews."
My long belief is that labor costs are the one things managers have any control over - especially with chain and franchise operations where everything else is 100% controlled by The Brand - and so they're insane about it. A good manager is a manager who minimizes labor costs. That's all they can do.