Whenever you go out to eat, have you ever thought of how many people run the restaurant? There has been a massive decrease in the workforce of restaurants in LC, and many of them have been raising the starting wage in order to find new people.

According to Hannah Wells, manager at Sonic, “We have about five people a day if we’re lucky,”

To put that into perspective, there are typically 2-3 workers in the kitchen and upfront making the drinks; including the carhops that take out the food. This leads to longer wait times for your favorite items, and on some occasions, the store will close earlier.

“We’ve been short-staffed for about a year,” said Wells.

In a fast-paced restaurant like Sonic, being short-staffed is a bad situation. The most probable cause of this problem restaurants are facing is because of Covid-19. Many people are now working from home, and others may be unsure about getting a job in fear of getting Covid.

“Employees work about 5 days a week, and they usually have to work doubles,” Wells said.

Since there aren’t many people that are working, the ones that are working get a pretty heavy workload. It may not seem like it would be that stressful, but all of the hours add up. After working an 11-13 hour shift, workers would go home and sleep just to wake up and go right back to work.