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Anecdotally, many service jobs I encounter on a regular basis have gone downhill in the past few years post-Covid. I'm thinking particularly servers and cafe clerks, but also public transport drivers. It's not that their individual performance has gotten worse - AFAICT, that's remained the same - but they're constantly understaffed, leading to just inevitably terrible service due to the long wait times. This also causes extra stress on the staff, which sometimes results in less-than-ideal performance that would have been better but for the extra pressure put on them due to the reduced staff.
My pet theory is that the Covid lockdowns made a lot of people in the service industries realize that these jobs generally weren't worth the pay in comparison to other ways they could be spending their time, whether that be staying at home or pursuing some other venue to make money, resulting in a shortage relative to what the economy was used to before. Perhaps it's a bit of a market correction, where these workers, for whatever reason, were priced below their market price, and suddenly a lot of the workers realized this at once and, in an uncoordinated fashion, simultaneously decided to quit the industry.
I'd add that the 2021-22 period was also one of uncertainty for many service sector workers because governments promised that restrictions will be eased soon, but nobody knew if this'll last, or there'll be a policy reversal due to a new panic once the data arrives about supposedly growing COVID rates and whatnot. I'd assume many people decided that they can't just sit around waiting for times to get better sometime in the future, and left the sector.
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My impression is that Covid was a signal for Boomers to retire. Now all those service jobs which used to be filled with Boomers are staffed by nobody, so labor is hard to find and more expensive. As a concrete example, an aquaintence was a nursing assistant and dropped from full-time to retired in May of 2020. They have since returned to work, but only around 4 hrs/wk, and only in 1-1 care for clients they like, rather than the more economically efficient (but more demanding) group care. Social security is paying about what they used to make; why would they subject themselves to the stressful job?
Might be even worse than that, if retirees freed up a whole cascade of jobs via promotion. There was absolutely a hiring flurry in my industry and I wonder if it attracted some lower-skill employees who’d otherwise have been finishing their vocational training.
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This is exactly what happened with our local healthcare. Nurse past retirement age finally "retired," then took up private practice to fill the gaps left by the completely incompetent hospital district, now "retiring for real except for helping friends/whoever asks because she can't say no."
Competent boomers were absolutely doing all the actual work, and losing them is destroying the institutional knowledge of every industry.
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