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A national fast-food restaurant chain is putting its corporate office workers to work in restaurants amid the continuing shortage of workers.
Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers Co-CEO and COO AJ Kumaran told TODAY Food that on a business call last week he mentioned that they are “struggling to have meaningful crew members.” in the field.
“Our business is very, very busy and we need more people,” he told people on the call. ” It’s very hard. So, before I knew it, my phone started exploding with people asking me, “How can we help? “
Kumaran said everyone – even at the company level – is trained when they start in the business as a cook and fries cashier.
“If you look at my title, I’m the COO, CEO, French Fries Cook and Cashier,” he explained. “So I said, ‘Well, why don’t we all step in to help groups of people and help fill in some of the gaps? “”
He said they have 750 corporate employees, with around 500 in their main office in Dallas and another 250 in the field already.
“So we said anybody who wants to sign up can sign up and just go out there and do whatever it takes,” he said. In some cases, the employee helps out as a french fries cook or at the cash desk, but they also organize job fairs, interviews and training.
The Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based company has 580 locations nationwide and plans to hire 10,000 new restaurant workers by the end of November, according to a Bloomberg report.
“What we’re doing is kind of like approaching everyone on the bridge,” he said.
Raising Cane plans to invest nearly $ 70 million in pay increases over the next few weeks for frontline workers, Kumaran said.
“Restaurants still account for nearly a million jobs, about 8% less than before the pandemic, which is double the national employment levels,” Vanessa Sink, spokesperson said today. of the National Restaurant Association. “Restaurant jobs remain below June 2019 levels in 46 states and DC”
Sink pointed to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed 1.4 million restaurant job postings on the last working day in June.
This is something Kumaran knows well. He explained that all restaurants operate on “very thin margins”.
“Wages or the market is very competitive, wages are rising, the cost of doing business is rising, the supply chain is a mess and prices are rising,” he said, adding that he had no idea of how mom-and-pop businesses are surviving the pandemic. “These are unprecedented times to say the least. It is my heart that goes to them.
CORRECTION (October 8, 2021, 4:13 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Raising Cane’s has 530 locations – it actually has 580.
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