No labor shortage at this restaurant
$15/hour wages, 401(k)s help encourage loyalty at Hawkers
Maxwell: Hawkers has no problem hiring thanks to $15/hour wages, 401(k)s.
Restaurants all over America are struggling to find workers.
Not Hawkers.
The Orlando-based chain of Asian street fare has started paying all non-tipped employees at least $15 an hour, all tipped employees at least $8 an hour and offering workers a rarity in the food-service world — a 401(k) program.
Now the companies’ staffing problems are largely solved. “We want to take care of our people. We also want to run a successful business,” said CEO Kaleb Harrell. “There are win-wins in business. And this is one of them.”
The story isn’t unique to Hawkers or even Orlando. All over America, restaurants and other employers are raising wages just to get people to show up to work.
Welcome to the employees’ job market.
As we exit the pandemic, America is resetting of the salary bar. And it’s about time.
Some will instinctively reply: Well, if we raise wages, prices will also go up!
Probably. That’s how it should be. Consumers have a role to play in making the economy work for everyone.
See, there’s a human price to cheap eats. That’s something I began to appreciate years ago when writing about the farmworkers being exploited in the fields of Florida, living in workforce housing and picking tomatoes from sunup to sundown for pennies a pound.
Maybe you don’t like that idea. But how else do you think you get a tomato-pickle-and-lettuce-topped burger on a $1 value menu?
It’s all part of the same culinary ecosystem where consumers crave cheap eats, driving down what eateries and distributors are willing to pay for food and labor.
But there’s a national reckoning taking place right now, as fewer people are willing to work jobs that don’t also allow them to make ends meet. Can you blame them?
Restaurant wages in America are up 60% over the last seven years, according to the Washington Post.
Which brings us back to Hawkers.
After struggling with labor woes early in the pandemic, Harrell said he and his partners reminded themselves of vows they’d made to each other early on — to be “an employer of choice.” It meant being a place where people wanted to work and stay.
So they hiked pay long before Florida’s $15-an-hour minimum wage takes effect in 2026, added a retirement benefit and re-committed themselves to making sure they were listening to employees.
More than two-thirds of
employees ended up getting raises — about 50% for non-tipped employees and up to 40% for tipped — and turnover plummeted. That helped Hawkers’ bottom line, since the company wasn’t spending thousands of dollars and countless hours recruiting, vetting and training each new worker.
Hawkers’ story is an American success story. Four guys, friends since college, loved food and wondered if they could make a career out of it. So they picked their favorite cuisine — street fare hawked by vendors in the bustling cities of Southeast Asia — and decided to see if people liked it.
They did. The small plates of pork belly bao, crispy shrimp and the restaurant’s famous wings were such a hit that one restaurant on Mills Avenue in Orlando became two. And then three. And now 10 up and down the east coast, as far north as Maryland.
Admittedly, the guys — three of whom have Asian heritage and relied upon generational family recipes to craft their menus — have economies of scale that help them invest more than some mom-and-pop restaurants can. But we’ve seen other local businesses pioneers say that raising wages improved their own bottom lines.
Banker Ken LaRoe was ahead of the economic curve back in 2014 when he decided to offer a minimum starting salary of $30,000 for every employee at his upstart Mount Dora-based First Green Bank. It didn’t matter whether they were a teller or a courier. Everyone made at least $30,000 —a practice LaRoe said paid dividends by attracting top talent.
“If I’ve got the perfect teller, and she gives the kind of service that makes customers tell three other people who start banking here, that raise pays for itself,” he said at the time. “It massively helps the whole business.” The bank was such a financial success, another bank gobbled it up.
Many businesses say they can’t find employees, even though most Floridians stopped getting unemployment benefits long ago. And that’s probably true — for the wages they’re offering.
But if they offered (as a silly example) $100 an hour, they’d have applicants beating down their door. So somewhere between $100 and whatever they’re offering now is the free-market rate at which they can find labor — a point I’ve made to my own employer when complaints pop up about not being able to find enough newspaper carriers.
Yes, higher wages may lead to higher prices. That is just an economic reality.
Low wages are a long-standing problem in Central Florida. This newspaper has slaughtered a small forest printing articles on the topic. Yet some people don’t consider that their problem.
Well, guess what? It is your problem once there’s no left to serve you lunch.
And with Florida’s population growth slowing — as more workers realize they can’t make ends meet in a state where wages are low and housing costs skyrocketing — Florida’s previously steady stream of cheap labor is slowing as well.
This is that financial reckoning we were talking about. Higher wages. Maybe higher prices. Higher expectations for paying people who work a full-time job what it takes to keep a roof over their head.
Harrell said he and his partners have concluded they can do all that and enhance their bottom line. “I believe that businesses have a social responsibility, and part of that is being a quality employer,” he said. “I think the two can co-exist.”