The future of restaurant labor is about making every available hour count.

The future of restaurant labor is about making every available hour count.

The old summer staffing playbook is breaking, and the restaurant operators who don’t understand how to adapt are going to suffer the consequences.

Let me explain.

For decades, restaurants have counted on teenagers and young adults to fill out their teams during peak season.

That labor pool is getting smaller.

The National Restaurant Association's latest summer forecast shows roughly 200,000 fewer teenagers in the labor force compared to this time with the past two years. The 20-24 cohort is down too, with lower participation heading into one of the most important seasons of the year.

It's a structural shift operators are already feeling on the floor.

For years, the industry absorbed high turnover because the labor supply was deep enough to keep pace. When the pool shrinks, that model breaks faster than most people expect. And it exposes a problem that was always there: most hiring and scheduling systems were built around abundance.

That era is over.

The operators who navigate this well won’t get there by simply hiring harder. They’ll get there by keeping the people they already have. That means building schedules around how workers actually live: their availability, their other jobs, their commute, their classes, their childcare, and their real-life constraints.

Younger workers are not just comparing restaurant jobs to other restaurant jobs. They are comparing them to DoorDash, Lyft, and gig work that gives them flexibility and control. If the schedule feels arbitrary, unpredictable, or impossible to fit into their life, they will find something that does.

The businesses that come out ahead this summer will be those that retain the best workers, by giving them schedules that actually fit their lives.

That's what we're building at Ando.

And summers like this one are exactly why.