The Great Resignation

While travelling in the US in August ‘21, I observed a number of painful things happening to restaurants, the hospitality sector and their customers. Innovation in hospitality technology is urgently required.

Before jumping to the pain, I want to first acknowledge the overwhelming sense of jubilance that oozed from customers in restaurant experiences. Many people had their first outside-the-home social experiences with friends and family in seventeen months, and the joy and liberation were palpable. It reminded me of how lucky we were to escape the worst parts of Covid in Australia. Yes, we've had a hard lockdown in many parts of Australia. But we survived, safely isolated on our island nation, until vaccines were developed and ready for roll-out; we largely escaped the crippling health crisis that unfolded in many countries. I expect we will all treasure every minute of our social time together once we have it back, in the same way that people are in the US.

Restaurants have hustled and pivoted to accommodate Covid and social distancing in their dining experiences. In Los Angeles, restaurant parking lots are now outside dining spaces. Astroturf, string lights, container plants and mobile propane heaters are creating an “inviting-enough” outdoor customer experience for the newly liberated and vaccinated population. In San Francisco, the city stepped up to help by opening up the outside lane on many streets, previously used for street parking, to create new outdoor dining areas for restaurants. In Philadelphia, more than 400 restaurants have opened up outdoor dining in street parking spots. It makes me happy finding out about so many venues hacking their way to serving customers safely outside and thereby hopefully finding a way to survive.

Customers experience the imperfections of these workaround spaces because they've been created as tactical reactions rather than designed from first principles. But, customers were so happy to be out that they were prepared to be patient with service. For example, it’s often not possible for staff to oversee guests and easily anticipate their needs in a pod assembled on the street in the way they could from a Captain’s table located at a central vantage point in a thoughtfully-designed restaurant. Mobile service and ordering technologies can help address these spatial problems, which will become more acute when customers’ patience wears off.

The most striking challenge for restaurants and other venues is the struggle to find staff, and it's crippling their businesses.

This is will become acute by October in the US when retail becomes a stronger competitor for staff as they leap into seasonal hiring. At a dinner in a mid to upscale restaurant in Venice Beach, the manager came to our table on arrival and asked us to order everything in one go up front. He said he wanted to make it easier to serve us because they were very short on staff; this was a first for me.

They dub this phenomenon the Great Resignation; people working in hospitality are shifting to other fields, where benefits are better, base pay rates are higher, they have fewer health safety concerns, and their hours don't intrude as much on their social and family time. All of these reasons are valid and enduring, so the hospitality world must find ways to do more with fewer people. Technology will be core to solving this challenge.

Customers have quickly adapted from paper to digital menus and ordering without breaking a step because digital has improved their customer experience in several ways:

Technology is already helping, but there is a really long way to go. I was surprised to find how ubiquitous, and often seamless mobile ordering has become, driven by contactless ordering. Customers have quickly adapted from paper to digital menus and ordering without breaking a step because digital has improved their customer experience in several ways: it’s faster to pay, it’s often faster to order a second glass of wine from your phone rather than wait to catch the eye of a server, and you might even be able to split the check without someone having to play banker. Because they’ve benefited from digital, consumers are poised for the tech in their hands to make further improvements to dining experiences. For example, personalised promotion and content innovations could further enhance ordering for customers by making better suggestions, which would also drive meaningful cross-selling and upselling, increasing average order size for venues.

“Win, win”, says the restaurant, “Where and how do I begin”?

The mass exodus from hospitality also creates a massive training challenge. You now have a less experienced team, because your talent left to take higher paying remote work or ecommerce distribution roles. Hospitality staff training is another massive opportunity for technology.

This visit gave me much to think about. For example, many of these challenges are making their way to Australia. The issues present themselves slightly differently, for example, in Australia it is less about not being able to find staff and more about the high cost of hospitality wages - but the effect is the same because it means that businesses must find a way to operate with less staff while also preserving great customer experiences.

This is a place where I could use my tech and hospitality experience to help solve some of these big problems. Nothing would make me happier as a customer than to have a healthy hospitality sector again, and nothing would make me happier as a professional than helping to make it happen.