Customers hungry for a bite to eat are being met with signs on restaurant doors reading that they’re hiring, or they can’t open during certain hours. This is because local and chain restaurants across Gilmer are short staffed.
River Street Tavern has been serving customers wings, burgers and local beers in downtown Ellijay since 2014.
While they are able to open daily this year, they’ve previously been forced to close one day a week due to staffing issues, which their manager said caused a lot of frustration among customers. Now, they still do not have enough servers, and are especially short staffed in their kitchen.
“People have to pick up extra shifts or stay longer hours on top of their already full-time schedule,” Nicole Furness said. “That’s currently what I’m doing. I have to work seven days a week right now. I am the manager so I have to pick up where other areas are losing people.”
She feels that the lack of affordable housing in the county and officials focusing too much on the tourism industry, are to blame for staffing issues.
“You have locals who want to stay here, people don’t want to have to leave … but some of us just don’t have a choice,” she voiced. “It’s just a big systemic issue, and it all goes back to needing more housing.”
She said during their slow season, from January to mid-March, a lot of food service workers quit and look elsewhere for a job, because they aren’t making enough money to afford to live in the county. Many employees also have to work multiple jobs year-round, just to make ends meet, she noted.
On the topic of tourism in the county, she added, “I understand why [Gilmer officials] want to put all their focus on tourism, but at the same time, you have to remember you get tourists because of your local people.”
Kent Sanford, the executive director of the Greater Gilmer Joint Development Authority, points to local demographics to explain why restaurants are so short staffed. With Gilmer being a prevalent retirement community, consequently, there are fewer people available to work.
“We’ve tried to encourage a lot of folks that are retired to consider coming back and taking part-time jobs, but that’s a hard sell,” Sanford said. “Some folks don’t mind coming out of retirement for a few hours a week, but a lot of the folks in our community … are just not interested in coming back to work.”
He added that the increasingly high cost of living in a retirement community has been pushing younger people to move out in search of more affordable housing.
“We need more income-appropriate housing in order to allow people, at every level of the economic scale, to be able to live in a community for it to thrive,” Sanford said. “Long term, we need to have more answers on the housing front.”
The Greater Gilmer Joint Development Authority is working to combat staffing issues, to help keep local restaurants and businesses’ doors open.
Sanford explained some of their initiatives include working with Gilmer High School to showcase to students what food service jobs are available.
Through the GHS College and Career Academy, Sanford said they try training students for jobs they can do locally, like with the culinary program that teaches the basic skills for them to work in hospitality.
Just in the last few months, he said a local team has trained with Georgia Power’s Create Program, to come up with ways to strengthen businesses across the community. They are currently working on a targeted job fair at the high school, allowing for restaurants that are hiring to speak directly to prospective applicants.
To remain competitive as more and more restaurants open in the county, some are working on unique initiatives to stay staffed, Sanford mentioned. That can include buying property to offer staff housing, and even sharing servers to work at different restaurants on different days.
“It’s a complicated situation,” he vocalized. “It did not happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight.”