Re: What has changed?

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JBWX
What has changed, the demand or the supply?

Last month the Wall Street Journal published an article about how the pandemic has dramatically decreased the labor supply:
Over Two Million Americans Aren’t Working Due to Long Covid

The article is paywalled, but fair-use allows me to share this very short excerpt:

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Wall Street Journal
Between two million and four million Americans aren't working due to the long-term effects of Covid-19, according to a new Brookings Institution report released Wednesday.

The inability to work translates to roughly $170 billion a year in lost wages, the report estimates. It follows a January Brookings Institution report that estimated long Covid was potentially causing 15% of the country's labor shortage.

The report estimates that roughly 16 million Americans of working age—between 18 and 65—have long Covid, which most groups and doctors define as wide-ranging symptoms that persist for months following an infection and can include shortness of breath, extreme fatigue and neurocognitive issues.

Restaurant work is very physically taxing work --a person cannot successfully wait tables when they are short of breath, fatigued and suffering from neurocognitive issues that prevent them from remembering who ordered what -- so I assume those 16 million workers are no longer able to do most restaurant jobs. That has to be a huge problem for the hospitality industry because those 16 million workers are about 7% of the US workforce (since there are approximately 215 million people of working age in the US.)

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Chris Webster