By CHERYL ROMANO/YachatsNews.com
As she surveys her bustling restaurant on a pre-Thanksgiving Friday, Rosetta Dimiceli is grateful that her staff is about to get some time off.
“The summer was so crazy. We were so busy, we could hardly handle it,” says the owner of the Salty Dawg Bar & Grill in Waldport and co-owner of The Sea Note in Yachats.
Her popular Waldport eatery is closed through Christmas for renovations, and it will be a welcome break for the staff. “They need some rest after the summer,” Dimicelli said. During a typically slow winter season, many other restaurants also close for several weeks to a month to clean, repair, save some costs and let staff recharge.
Like other restaurant and lodging owners surveyed by YachatsNews, Dimicelli says a surge of tourists made the summer season especially hot and winter is shaping up to be busier than normal. That would ordinarily be good news, but staff shortages and supply chain disruptions are making “business as usual” a special challenge. Some examples:
- Linda Hetzler, owner of the Drift Inn Hotel & Restaurant in Yachats, recently had to drive to the Willamette Valley to buy 16 cases of frozen fruit that her regular vendor couldn’t deliver. Linen sheets that she ordered last February for the hotel finally arrived — in November. She and her husband drove to Seattle to pick them up.
- At The Sea Note, Dimicelli and co-owner son, Brian, have been doubling as cooks. “We hired about 12 cooks this summer; they worked one or two days, and then they’d leave because they couldn’t find a place to live.”
- The Village Bean, a drive-through coffee shop in Yachats, has had to close at noon some days due to staff shortages. “If you say you’re open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., you need to be open then; it’s so awful for your reputation,” said owner Barbara Shepherd. “It makes it tough to run a business.”
- At the Fireside Hotel, a key employee is living in a converted room there because of the area’s rental housing shortage. Two more rooms are being converted for the same use.
- The Adobe Resort, Yachats’ biggest hotel/restaurant property, has stopped serving weekday breakfasts due to staff shortages. Two-night minimum stays were imposed to avoid overworking staff. And they aren’t booking any weddings for next year, “Because I don’t have enough restaurant staff,” says general manager Anthony Muirhead.
Calm, but busy winter
Summer’s tourist surge along the central coast seemed to reflect pent-up demand for travel — especially as international coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions again kept travelers closer to home than usual.
“People had pandemic money, and a lot of people could work from home. We have really good Wi-Fi,” said Hetzler of The Drift Inn. “So people would come in with family and friends, work on their laptops, and order beverages and food.”
The Fireside Motel and Overleaf Lodge & Spa also experienced a “very good” summer, said Drew Roslund, who oversees operations at both properties. “We had plenty of demand, and were hampered a little bit by staffing,” he said.
Working now with a core staff of about 40 employees, he foresees a calmer winter.
“We’re seeing some softness in the push to come to the coast. I think people have gotten the cobwebs out over the last eight months. It gives the staff a bit of a break.”
“We did so well this summer, I’d say ‘Pinch me, is it real?’” says Shepherd of The Village Bean. She and her husband, Tony, also manage the Sea Perch RV Resort near Tenmile, which had its second straight banner year.
“I’d think, ‘Don’t let all those tourists go to Italy anymore — just get ‘em in their travel trailers and get ‘em over here,’” she laughed.
No one is laughing, though, at the housing shortage that keeps hospitality workers from staying at jobs along the central Coast.
“There’s just no housing, so when people who came to work couldn’t find a place to live, they’d get a paycheck and leave,” she said about staffing the Sea Note. Her staff at Waldport’s Salty Dog is stable and largely established, with residences in the area.
To try to do something about housing, Dimiceli is working to turn a former commercial building in Waldport into a triplex apartment for her employees.
Challenges include childcare
The lack of childcare for working families is another reason for the staffing drought, said Jamie Michel of Sweet Homes Getaways, the Yachats/Waldport-based vacation rental firm that manages 80 properties in Lincoln County.
“We’re affected by the staffing shortage the same way everybody else is,” said Michel, vice president of business development and public policy. However, she speculates that childcare may also be a root issue.
When pandemic unemployment benefits ended in late September, a predicted uptick in available workers didn’t seem to materialize along the coast.
“It makes us wonder if childcare isn’t a barrier, in addition to housing,” she said. “In the hospitality business, childcare needs aren’t Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. So the challenge of childcare becomes even more challenging.”
Michel, whose firm employs some 50 people year round, is also head of the Central Coast Hospitality Alliance for the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association.
“We’re in a childcare desert, and ORLA has been been partnering with some childcare development specialists in the region to see what can be done about providing the services needed,” she said.
Based on current visitor demand, Michel predicts “another strong winter” after a summer that she said was “excellent.”
Boosting pay, recruiting creatively
Staffing shortages in the hospitality industry, of course, is a nationwide problem, and by no means restricted to Oregon’s coast. Major employers can run TV ads trying to recruit workers, offering incentives like sign-on bonuses, benefits and higher pay. Some small coastal businesses are unwilling or unable to boost worker compensation, while others can and do.
Roslund said his Fireside and Overleaf operations were already near the top of the pay scale for motels on the central coast. But “We’ve increased our starting pay even from that level, plus incentives,” he said.
Roslund said the motels’ owners give financial bonuses in the fall to workers who make it through the summer. But one holiday tradition had to change due to supply chain disruptions. While staffers at the two hotels normally receive turkeys and Christmas hams bought at Ray’s Market in Waldport, “The market called and said they don’t have them this year — so we’ll give our employees money to spend at Ray’s.”
The Adobe increased worker pay, as well, and is “Trying to find creative ways to find people,” says Muirhead — like posting openings on social media, and encouraging current staff to recruit people in the community.
“We have a housing crisis going on so we can’t get new people here,” Muirhead said. “Our working population is really small; we’re all competing for the same people.”
The problem will persist until there are more people of working age and until there is better workforce housing.
Muirhead, a member of the Yachats City Council, hustled out of one council meeting this summer to go clean rooms.
“This isn’t an Anthony problem, it’s true for everybody” who works in the hospitality industry, he said. “I’ve been a dishwasher, cook, server, busser, housekeeper and front desk agent. There’s not a single job in the place I didn’t work this summer.”
Hetzler of the Drift Inn echoes that experience.
“We’re just endlessly scrambling — working seven days a week, in the middle of the night, all the time. The locals know what we’re up against — they’ve heard.”
“…it’s hard to keep it all going”
Hetzler said profit margins in the hospitality business are “already pretty slim” and put under more pressure during nearly two years of the pandemic.
“Some people think ‘What’s so hard about making food?’ but it’s hard to keep it all going,” she said. “Staff problems, supply problems … people work their butts off to put food on the table for customers.”
Some of those customers have been less than understanding of the pressures on lodgings and restaurants.
Speaking for The Sea Note and Salty Dawg, Demiceli says, “If there’s one message I could put out there, I’d ask people to be a little more considerate.”
Some customers during the busy summer would walk in with a large party and expect immediate service. “These are small kitchens up and down the coast; you’re not going to get your order in 15 minutes,” she said.
Demiceli knows she’ll miss out on business by closing the Salty Dawg in December — but the toll on her staff would be too great.
“Usually the winter is slow, and that’s why I used to close from Thanksgiving to Christmas,” she said. “But this year we’ve still been busy. The help needs some rest after the summer.”
Despite the hurdles of staff and supplies that sometimes seem “insurmountable,” Hetzler remains positive.
“After the past few years, it’s hard to imagine something that we can’t make it through,” she said.
- Cheryl Romano is a Yachats freelance reporter who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. She can be reached at Wordsell@gmail.com