New Pizzeria Set to Open on Thayer Street. The Only Glitch? It Can’t Find Workers.
Tuesday, February 08, 2022
A new pizzeria is ready to open on Thayer Street on the East Side of Providence.
The only problem — the owner says he can’t find workers.
“Mike’s Pizza” has a sign advertising it is “coming soon” to the storefront where the Army-Navy Store used to be.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTGoLocal spoke with Thayer Street veteran Mike Boutros this week, about his latest foray into the commercial strip that his family has been stalwarts on for decades.
Now, however, it is facing a challenge that many businesses as wrestling with -- labor.
One Business Owner’s Struggle for Labor
“The place is set up and ready to go,” Boutros told GoLocal of the pizzeria planned for the northern end of Thayer Street. “First and foremost, I need someone to run the place — they could get a ‘piece of the pie,’ so to speak.”
Boutros knows Thayer Street.
He told GoLocal that he owns Chinatown and Mike’s Calzones; his family owns the popular Eastside Pockets across the street that has been a constant for nearly thirty years, as popular businesses have come and gone since then.
“I’ve been searching for employees for about a month,” said Boutros of his new pizza and pasta concept. “In total, I’ll need about six people [to work]. We want to be open from 10 AM in the morning to 2 AM at night.”
While there are other pizza options, in the area, Boutros said he believes he has a niche.
“It’s going to be Greek pizza — and paninis, pasta, and lasagna, which you can’t really get on Thayer Street right now, “ he said.
Overall, Boutros said that things have been “going well” at his other businesses on Thayer Street in recent years.
Except, now, he needs more workers.
Local and National Restaurant Picture
During the pandemic, restaurants were forced to scale back, shut down temporarily, and in some cases, never reopen.
In Rhode Island, Siena Restaurants offered $250 gift certificates in April of 2021 to anyone who provided an employee referral that led to a hire. On January 22, the original Siena location on Federal Hill closed for good.
Industry expert Michael Bissanti wrote for GoLocal last month, “It’s Not Just COVID Closing Restaurants.”
“As COVID closed restaurants and kicked workers to the curb, many chose jobs outside the industry for better pay, better hours (who wants to work weekends?) and more. It wasn’t just that there were no restaurant jobs,” wrote Bissanti. “Times have changed, and the demands of today's restaurant workers have changed, but the restaurant industry has been slow to respond. Many of the workers who lost restaurant jobs because of COVID are simply not going back to those jobs. The sacrifices a restaurant career demands are no longer appealing.”
Rhode Island is certainly not unique. As federal jobs gains surged by 467,000 in January — the restaurant industry across the country continues to struggle.
“Restaurant workers go ‘missing’ again from Washington’s job recovery,” reported the Seattle Times on January 20, 2022:
Many restaurants and bars are still dealing with a worker shortage that predated the pandemic and has only sharpened as the industry has tried to rebound from various COVID-related shutdowns.
Even after more than 18 months of economic recovery, Washington’s leisure and hospitality business is still missing around 40,000, or 11.5%, of the workers it had in December 2019, state data shows.
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