Eateries caring more about this ingredient: THE STAFF
A survey shows a change in attitude forced by the pandemic labor exodus
One of the biggest challenges restaurants are facing is taking care of their employees as well as their customers, according to a marketing platform for restaurants.
Employee well-being became part of restaurant culture in 2023, and restaurants will be advertising as great places to work this year, researchers announced in their 2023 Restaurant Trend Report, released by Bentobox in December.
Conclusions come from data supplied by Bentobox clients, which senior brand marketer Lenny Defranco said are thousands of restaurants across the country.
The study found that last year, restaurant spending rose about 6.7% nationally and 5.8% in Western states, and that restaurants countered inflation and labor shortages by working smarter. But it also found that staffing remains a concern.
The COVID-19 pandemic that shut down restaurants in 2020 caused a generation of hospitality workers to leave their day-to-day grind and assess what they were doing with their careers, he observed in a phone interview. Employers also faced 3½ years of unprecedented soul-searching.
“Restaurant culture had to expand to include employee well-being. They had to become places where people wanted to come back to work.”
Looking across websites and their job posting pages, researchers saw a 386% increase in the term “paid time off,” a 175% increase in “paid vacation,” a 100% increase in “health care” and a 53% increase in “mental health.”
“Restaurants really are taking seriously
“Restaurants really are taking seriously the need to offer a level of employee benefit and employee accommodation that was just not the norm pre-pandemic.”
— Lenny Defranco, senior brand marketer
the need to offer a level of employee benefit and employee accommodation that was just not the norm pre-pandemic,” Defranco said.
“It became pretty clear if you talk to workers, as we have at Bentobox, and also talked to restaurants, what they needed to do to attract new workers or to bring people back. A lot of it was people were sick of the old, traditional restaurant culture, how demanding it was, how unforgiving it was on schedules. The culture within the kitchen tended to be abusive in many ways. And people just kind of said, ‘I’m not going to go back to that.’ Solving those problems is part of what this is about.”
The report touches on attitudes toward tipping, which Bentobox also addressed in a separate survey report called “The Restaurant Tipping Point.”
The rise of paying with credit or debit cards has led to “tip creep,” when customers are presented with preset tip options by card readers.
Customers don’t particularly like tipping, but they’re used to it, according to Bentobox. Tipping is about customers feeling in control, but tip creep confuses them.
“Perhaps because of a strong willingness to tip, diners are being asked to do it more and more. It’s having a negative effect on diner sentiment,” the survey reads.
The survey called automated tip prompts broadly unpopular. But attitudes are generational. Bentobox found 60% of diners over 40 said they don’t like automatic tip prompts for fast food purchases, as opposed to 47% of younger people. And boomers are less likely to tip for coffee or takeout.
There is no clear solution, but Defranco said, “If you want to take away tipping, you have to give diners a new way to stay in control.”
The 2023 trends report employed the Openai chatbot CHATGPT to analyze the language used in senders’ notes in more than 62,000 gift card purchases. Most of the messages were personal, and the most common occasions were holidays and birthdays.
Defranco sees a role for artificial intelligence in the restaurant business in helping with routine communications.
“Restaurants are businesses that are constantly stretched thin, and usually work is done by someone that has no business doing it because they’re too busy, and maybe they’d rather focus on creating a new menu item than figuring out a marketing campaign or writing a marketing email. But with CHATGPT, that became a lot easier.”
But he described the dining industry as “fundamentally anti-ai.”
“I think as more of the world becomes Ai-generated, people are definitely going to want to gravitate towards authenticity and in-person experiences, and places where they can spend money and can get real human hospitality. I think that works to the benefit of restaurants.”