I'm really not as sure on the restaurant thing.
My gut says to me that in most areas there's just too many eateries and cost of living otherwise is too high and that explains a lot of the issues we're seeing. I agree with RM that I think the minimum wage thing in many areas is BS. There are McDonald's up here now offering 15+ an hour and I believe most wait staff in trafficked restaurants will not be affected by a min wage increase since a lot of people are incentivized to keep the tipping structure. However, I don't know if that's the issue right now, we have restaurants offering above local min wage consistently, and even good workplaces are having trouble finding PT staff. I think it's just a matter that fewer people are willing to do the kind of work restaurants have historically asked for.
I also don't think this is an irrational reaction. I don't think it's just "it pays too little", I think it's also "this is a thankless job without advancement I want to do that destroys my ability to enjoy weekends/nights". This isn't unique to food service* but is emblematic of it. Like, honestly, unless you are uniquely suited to being a great bartender/waiter and can make a LOT in tips, there's no real reason to go work at a food service venue over even retail at this point, because at least in retail you could hypothetically move around, have a more flexible schedule, etc. Once you add in the anecdotal reports of customers being worse/ruder to the people who are left, it just keeps adding up.
Like, I'm sure if a restaurant around here said "$20 an hour for servers and cooks" they'd get people, but I don't think people are staying away purely due to pay. I also don't think this is immediately fixable without some real pain and places shutting down due to it. There was a local article here about a Greek pizza place that was a sympathy piece over not having employees and needing to reduce hours, and sadly most of what I thought was "well, that's one less pizza place when we have 60 others in a 10 mile radius...". It's saturation, and at some point the number of people willing to make pizzas in a sweltering kitchen on their nights and weekends dries up.
Edit: So for funsies, I took a look at MIT's living wage calculator. They say Manchester, NH, where I live is viable on 30k pre-tax, which if $576.00 per week. At 40 a week, that's still $14.40 or so an hour, ignoring that a lot of restaurants won't be giving 40 a week by design or necessity. Great, so that's below most independent eateries already. But they assume that housing is 9.6k per year ($800) and I think finding even a studio apartment for that now is near impossible. Transportation at 4k or so is low unless you don't have a car payment (in Manchester you largely need a car especially if you work in the restaurant industry), etc. Medical is listed at 3k, but most people working these jobs aren't insured through the job, so that's risky as hell. I don't think a $15 min wage moves that needle personally up here. If I were a bread-winner, I'm not stepping foot in an uninsured food service job unless I HAVE to, and even then $10-$15 an hour would be real hard to justify as there's a non-zero chance I could make my own hustle for a bit with that time.
