Senior citizens take the place of teens

The sullen teenager grinding through a restaurant shift after school was once a cliche. Today, though, that worker could be a senior citizen.

Older workers are showing up at casual dining chains and fast-food operators like McDonald’s, and restaurants are recruiting in seniors’ centres and churches.

Recruiters in the US say older workers have soft skills — a friendly demeanour, punctuality — that their younger cohorts sometimes lack.

Two powerful trends are at work: a labour shortage and the propensity for longer-living Americans to keep working — even part-time — to supplement often-meagre retirement savings.

Stevenson Williams, 63, manages a Church’s Chicken in North Charleston, South Carolina. He’s in charge of 13 employees, having worked his way up from a cleaning and dishwashing job he started about four years ago and sometimes works as many as 70 hours a week when it’s busy.

Williams is a retired construction worker and had never worked at a restaurant before, but was bored staying at home.

“It’s fun for a while, not getting up, not having to punch a clock, not having to get out of bed and grind every day,” he says. “But after working all your life, sitting around got old. There’s only so many trips to Walmart you can take.

“I just enjoy Church’s Chicken. I enjoy the atmosphere, I enjoy the people.”

Hiring seniors is a good deal for fast-food chains. They get years of experience for the same wages they would pay someone decades younger. James Gray from Calibrate Coaching says older people are also a good deal financially because they aren’t always looking to move up and earn more.

Seniors typically have more developed social skills than kids who grew up online and often would rather not be bothered with real-world interactions.

At Church’s Chicken, Williams coaches his younger co-workers on the niceties of workplace decorum. “A lot of times with the younger kids now, they can be very disrespectful,” he says. “So you have to coach them and tell them this is your job, this is not the street.”

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