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LETTER FROM THE USA
Going to the restaurant currently takes a lot of patience. Although almost all Covid measures have been lifted since spring, a trip to the gastronomy is like an adventure with an uncertain outcome. In some places the guest is greeted with a neon-colored sign on the door. “Help wanted” – this means “help wanted” in German. However, the restaurants in Colorado and the surrounding American states need help. You need help in the form of willing employees. The situation is so bad that this summer my two children got a job offer in a motorway restaurant. Of course, this was just a well-intentioned joke by the young waitress. In fact, we encountered the same situation over and over again during our summer voyages of discovery: queues in front of the company, full tables and breathless waiters. With a little luck, our orders were more or less exactly fulfilled in a reasonable time. The obviously overburdened staff apologized for the shortcomings.
The complete opening of the restaurants in spring created a shaky situation. On the one hand, the Americans are more than ready to be catered for again, on the other hand, the unemployed are still receiving the Covid subsidy. Thanks to the boost, many unemployed people who had a minimum wage job before Corona, for example in the catering trade, often receive more “wages” than if they were to re-enter the labor market. Out of 25 job seekers with an appointment for an interview, only one person appears on average for the interview. This then gets the job without a lot of ifs and buts. So it happens that in the evening at 8 p.m. an unshaven, sleepy waiter shuffles through the restaurant without an order pad and after a long wait serves us a fried egg instead of a hamburger.
Not only the gastronomy suffers. Due to the lack of lifeguards, the outdoor pool in our neighborhood had to introduce shorter opening times this summer. And two teenagers tried for weeks to keep the popular trampoline park afloat.
Regula Grenier
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