Stores (mostly restaurants) will up and close during the day more and more. Are people still getting stimulus type govt money, are they sick or crippled from the jab, where are they?
If nothing else the workers from all of the coincidental food processing fires should now need jobs to be filling in.
As far as semi-skilled labor in the southeast... Workers are just lazy now. You hire 10, you get one worth keeping, IF you’re lucky. Sporadic attendance and shoddy work ethic. If they come to work, they put in a lackluster performance. A month without an attendance occurrence is practically unheard of. These are forklift operators making 20 dollars an hour. I can imagine it’s even worse for restaurants. They’d rather stay gone and play video games.