Labor
Nearly 50% of San Francisco small businesses remain closed, data shows
ABC7 6/16
Nearly 50% of the San Francisco’s small businesses are still closed, according to data from the city’s Chamber of Commerce compiled in May. It’s unclear how many of those closures are temporary or permanent.
Why It’s So Hard for Restaurants to Hire Workers Right Now: A career waiter explains.
Grub Street 6/16
Workers are staying away because the industry has never treated them with respect, and if restaurateurs expect to change nothing, and return to a time when they could count on a huge stack of résumés from highly skilled individuals who would put up with all manner of abuse for meager pay, they are mistaken.
Food Industry Policy
L.A. Times Food Bowl forum to focus on food waste, accessibility
Los Angeles Times 6/16
Los Angeles Times Food Bowl will host a free virtual food forum with discussions surrounding the issues of “food waste, food accessibility and the relationship to agriculture” from 6 to 7 p.m. June 23.
Seattle now requires food delivery companies to ink partnership agreements with restaurants
GeekWire 6/16
Following the lead of California cities that made similar changes, the council on an 8-0 vote acted after restaurants throughout the city complained that third-party delivery services post their menus online without permission and then picked up and delivered the food with little effort at quality control.
On the Side
MapLab: The Cities Where Chain Restaurants Dominate
Bloomberg 6/16
Using a dataset of nearly 800,000 independent and chain restaurants for the contiguous U.S., Liang and Andris crunched the total number of restaurants with the same name and created an average “chainness” score, which measures the likelihood of finding the same venues in other parts of the country depending on the geographic scale.
An SF Celebrity Invests in Vegan Food and His Hometown
Eater San Francisco 6/16
SF’s unofficial uncle, actor Danny Glover, has embraced a meat- and dairy-free lifestyle in recent years. Now he’s helping out Vegan Mob, the Oakland-based vegan restaurant with a hip-hop vibe.
