Higher Hire Numbers and Re-Re-Openings: Changes that need to be made in the West LA service industry

A week or so back, I was at my local Starbucks, chilling and working, having come from another cafe where I'd been working, and looking forward to being extra productive there. However, after I'd been there for an hour or so, the manager came up and informed me and the other patrons present that they would be closing at 8 pm that evening. I was disappointed and upset about this, since the company had recently implemented new hours from 5 am to 9 pm, which I had been used to and enjoyed, as it allowed me more time to work on my college assignments and art. Eventually, the manager herself told me they were closing early because she had no extra staff to work the night shift, and the workers already present were too tired to stay another hour. Rankled as I was about this abrupt interruption in my downtime, I understood why they had to close early and eventually packed up and went home at eight o'clock. But it got me thinking back to an issue I had noticed since 2021: a distinct shortage of excess or relief workers in the public service and retail sectors. 

There is, of course, plenty of reason and justification for this staffing anomaly in recent years: the COVID-19 pandemic meant that not only was there a strain on existing employees working at the time, but it also resulted in many in the service industry either falling ill and being put on sick leave or, presumably, dismissed if they didnt not show up to work after a specific grace period. In some cases, I wouldn't put that latter theory/explanation past many companies nowadays, given their tendency to cut costs by reducing staffing numbers and a shifting priority towards economy over efficiency. To the management of many organizations, customer satisfaction and serving the community are often less important than making back the massive profit losses accumulated during the lockdown period, which in itself is understandable from a business perspective, since more money made can also result in more money to pay the existing workforce and even hire new ones. Yet from 2021 onwards, I noticed a trend of fewer people working at places I went, such as coffee shops, fast food restaurants, and, as is still the case, public facilities like libraries and community colleges. Indeed, plenty of Starbucks locations I visited often either closed earlier than usual because the managers did not have enough staff to stay open later (During that period, closing at eight o'clock was considered "later") or because the district managers responsible for those branches had not gone to the trouble of rehiring more workers to replace the ones lost to the lockdown era. The problem became quite a nuisance, working at a coffee shop, something one hadn't been able to do for so long, only to be told, just as one was getting into the groove, that the place would be closing early because there weren't enough people to keep that particular location open. The staff shoratges became such a problem that at one point, I arrived at a Starbucks in West Hollywood only to find it closed, and going into the health food shop next door to complete another errand, I ended up running into the manager of that very cafe, who said she had to close because there weren't enough staff to stay open until eight. Annoyed as I was about that occurrence, especially given how casually she spoke about closing, as if a lost evening work session for me and a place to sit and drink coffee for anyone else there, I knew her hands were probably tied, since as I've learned in recent years, the blame for things going wrong in the service industry is not entirely on the people who you see and interact with in the stores themselves, but instead on their bosses, who, for the same reasons I've mentioned, and more, have been hesitant to make changes and improve matters so that business could proceed more productively than it currently did.

Perhaps the point I'm getting at is that something still needs to be done about the post-COVID workforce shortages and their effects on regular customers like myself. One such solution to all this, somewhat speculatively, could be a general push from all concerned to kickstart a new rehiring process that would allow us to eradicate things like understaffing and shorter, often inconvenient working hours in due time. The problem is, aside from certain companies having enough funds to get more hands on board, is that there is, at least from what I understand, a slightly biased and prejudiced form of systematic racism towards people of color. This lack of enthusiasm to start employing extra personnel purely because a large number of willing applicants are of a racial minority is, predictably but no less unfortunately, nothing new in terms of business today. For decades, there has been a push against non-white individuals holding a stable and prosperous position within large-scale industry, yet when the jobs in question are what someone of Caucasian ethnicity would either balk at or consider beneath them or too high intensity in nature, there is no shortage of employees eager to exploit those of color in regards to doing these menial and demanding tasks. Indeed, one of the many injustices the pandemic revealed was how many jobs available to most minorities were almost always difficult and tedious, required odd and insociable working hours, not to mention putting them at greater risk of contracting the dreaded Coronavirus. 

Of course, the cards of fate have been no less stacked against minorities before the outbreak: a 2010 report from the National Library of Medicine, by Robert Farlie and Kenneth Couch, details that in times of booming economic success, black workers are always the last ones to be hired, yet during recessions and downtowns, they are, paradoxically, almost always the first to be fired and/or laid off. We can trace this bias back even further, of course: a Brookings report from 1974 by Richard Freeman, taking its information from the author's study of racial patterns of labor market status between 1947 and 1972, explained that regarding business cycles, employment levels for black workers were a good deal more volatile than those associated with white employees. Freeman also concluded that when changes occurred in the business cycle, unemployment rates for both black and white people were similar in terms of proportionate responses. As such, black unemployment rose higher in percentage compared to that of white unemployment. Freeman's findings were proof of the ever-prevalent "last in, first out" theory that characterizes the black employment cycle. 

Of course, like any cycle, this needs to be broken to benefit everyone, not just customers and patrons, but also people who require employment, regardless of their ethnicity and race. It has been proven that in times of need and crisis, anyone can do their part if they're given the chance and enough rope to pull their weight. Yet not everyone gets to prove their worth in times of need. One such example can be found in the New American report Unpacking Inequities in Unemployment Insurance in the story of Baron, who, like many other workers, before March 2020, had a promising start in his own career as a regional sales manager for a luxury travel company in Florida, but was cruelly sidelined when the news of lockdowns and social distancing began to be enforced. Baron's host company started making changes in light of the unfortunate circumstances: it reduced workers' hours, demoted full-time employees to part-time positions,  consolidated multiple departments, and initiated a work-share program, all in a vain yet admirable attempt to avoid layoffs. But these corporate measures were a slight mistake, since merging departments led to existing staff fighting over open sales positions, with roughly 50 people competing for at least 10 available positions. One of Baron's coworkers, and a later layoff victim, described the situation as equal to something out of The Hunger Games. Eventually, Baron himself was dismissed in May 2020, though, as he later learned, he had been the highest-scoring applicant interviewed back in 2019. Unfortunately, the company preferred to retain its more experienced senior sales staff, which proves that ageism is as pressing an issue in business cycles as is racism. Baorn himself summed up the situation with the usual lament: "Last hired, first fired."

Another key element in improving the service and retail industries is the reopening and, in some cases, relocation of businesses to areas that may require their products and services. One notable problem I've noticed in the post-pandemic era is the dearth of essential stores and shops in many areas, especially coffee shops, dollar stores, and other places that may offer valuable items. There are plenty of handy store locations in my own neck of the woods, but there are also many closed shops and buildings in many parts of Westside LA. Most exemplary of this issue is Westwood, an area hit particularly hard by not only the pandemic's fallout but also the steady increase in vagrants and squatters, which has become an increasingly serious problem in Los Angeles. Westwood in general possesses a Jekyll and Hyde atmosphere in some aspects: plenty of busy and well-patronized restaurants and shops, as well as being home to the much-renowned UCLA college campus and expansive medical facilities, yet there are still plenty of empty stores and retail spaces, some of which have hosted prosperous stores less than a year or two ago, but most of which have now closed either due to the host company going bankrupt or the original owners having moved to another part of the city due to the landlords who own the physical buildings charging too much for rent. The near exorbitant and extortionative prices demanded for retail spaces in Los Angeles in general is but one of many causes for many fot hse vacant buildings, and it one of many things that must be fotiuhgt tooth and nail in orere to be changed so that rent is lowered to help more business, especially the mom-n-pop shops not protected by the safety net that stores owned by multi-million chain companies have. 

There is, as always, an paradoxical bit of irony to this factor, however: a February 2025 Brookings article by Andre M. Perry, Hannah Stephens, and Manannn Donoghoe entitled Driving Prosperity: How Black-owned business fueled recent economic growth relates how, despite COVID's resounding blow to entrepreneurs the world over, business owners have bounced back with an outright vengeance, with the Censue Bureau recording the number of new national business applicants as growing steadily between April and July 2020. (A stark contrast to early figures in better times, 2017 to 2019, which were last seen as being relatively stagnant.)  More to the point, the article states that Black-owned businesses, which have been gaining more traction in recent years, have contributed significantly to that entrepreneurial rise. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of Black-owned businesses increased by at least 56.9%, with over half of the new companies (70,000 out of 132,000) being Black-owned. The numbers associated with this area are inspiringly high, and thus positive, to one's ears: in 2022, for example, the number of black-owned businesses resulted in a $212 billion revenue boost to the economy, had at least eight people to each firm, and the salaries paid amounted to $16 billion in total. Indeed, the general increase in minority-owned businesses has been a tremendous boon to the American economy, $738 billion worth around 2022, in fact, and the number of jobs this boom made available numbered at 1.9 billion positions, an impressive increase compared to 2017.

All things considered, there's no reason why we citixens of West Los Angeles shouldn't expect more and more of our local economies to be improved over the coming years: there are, as I've mentioned, plenty of business owners and workers of all races helping push the country out of the financial doldrums by the dread days of masking mandates, social distancing policies, and online Zoom meetings all around. The next step, of course, is to make a wide enough berth for that success to reach all the nooks and crannies across America where its positive benefits and influence are most needed, by calling for changes in retail space pricing and increased rehiring initiatives. More of a focus on making any place of business, be it a convenience store, a fancy restaurant, or even a small local coffee shop, we can go back to the days some 5-6 years ago, when a stable regional economy was something to inspire civic pride and prove that for all its quirks, injustices (past and present), and the ever shifting priorities brought along by progress, America can still be the land where the streets are paved with gold.