Check, Please

As the hospitality industry struggles to get its bearings, perhaps it’s time to take an honest look at where it is, how it got here and where it needs to go

From the Fall 2021 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

Jason Ebert takes the philosophical approach. “What is hospitality?” he asks. "Is it the food we eat? Is it the way we are greeted?"

Ebert is executive director of University special events. His question cuts surgically to the heart of the moment. At its core, hospitality is a bodiless commodity, a thingless thing. It’s the je ne sais quoi that invisibly surrounds the other thing, which, ostensibly, is the thing being sold—the cup of coffee, the meal, the hotel room. And like any commodity, visible or invisible, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand.

It’s been in short supply for a while now. And demand is going through the roof.

“We are absolutely at a flashpoint,” says Kirsten Tripodi, director of Sacred Heart’s hospitality, resort and tourism management program in the Jack Welch College of Business & Technology, where Ebert is often a guest speaker.

“Our biggest challenge is labor,” she says, an issue making itself very evident in the current national shortage of hospitality workers.

To quickly break it down, consider that the industry can be divided into three types of employees. The long-term professionals—those with a genuine passion for the experience of hospitality—serve as the backbone of the industry. But the industry’s size and labor needs far exceed their numbers, so the rest of the hospitality workforce is made up of two other groups: those drawn to the industry by the flexibility of its counterculture hours (such as students and moonlighters) and those for whom the unskilled labor needs provide an opportunity for employment that other industries do not (the dishwashers, housekeepers, “burger flippers” and such).

But the demands on all of them, from the passionate professionals to the opportunists, are brutal. “No one works harder than a housekeeper in a hotel,” says Tripodi, “or a dishwasher in the dish pit.” Line cooks regularly work 14-hour days at a grueling pace with few breaks. The practice of tipping not only keeps servers’ wages uncertain and unstable, but has recently been linked directly to sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace. And owners and managers must navigate all of it through famously narrow margins in support of an unsustainable business model.

The proof of that unsustainability is all around. Hospitality workers are either leaving the industry in droves or refusing to return to it until circumstances change. For some, it’s the rapid evolution of remote work options that has offered a flexibility previously only found in hospitality. Now actors and moonlighters can earn a predictable income working flexible hours remotely and skip the hassle of customers asking waitresses to show them their smile for a better tip.

For others, the pandemic provided a rare moment of reflection, and the benefits of the industry balanced against its demands have in many places been found wanting.

“At its heart, hospitality is about the human connection,” says Ebert. It’s a relationship industry, built around the experience of trust and care—and an equitable appreciation of that experience, whether through respect or remuneration. And like any relationship, both parties need to pull their weight. As such, an industry that serves a culture is itself a snapshot of that larger culture, Ebert says.

“Our Catholic mission [at SHU] reminds us to value the human always,” Tripodi says, by which she means guests and staff alike—something the industry is not particularly known for. Front-of-house servers are famously undervalued by their employers, paid a pittance in hourly wages and expected to make their living through tips from their guests. Back-of-house cooks, cleaners and the like are the epitome of out of sight, out of mind. The response to complaints has classically been some version of “This is the way it is—if you don’t like the job, leave it.” And currently, an enormous swath of the industry has called that bluff.

So how does an entire industry—particularly one as integral to a national identity as hospitality is to America’s—pivot?

The answer, the professors suggest, might be as simple as reflecting on the mission at the industry’s heart. People need to connect to people.

Ironically, one way to facilitate this may be through technology, Tripodi predicts. The goal here is not to replace unskilled workers with bots—we’re a long way from a Jetsons-style chambermaid being a viable alternative to human housekeepers and dishwashers—but rather to expedite the mundane “busywork” of hospitality workers so they can focus on what they do best: elevate the guest experience.

Then, as for those workers themselves, Tripodi points to the European model of hospitality, where “service is considered a profession and compensated in an appropriate way.” It may cost more, she acknowledges, but also notes that the U.S. hospitality industry has been artificially inexpensive for far too long. As such, prices changing to appropriately reflect the cost of all commodities—including labor—might more be termed a “correction.”

One thing is certain: the moment is ripe for an industry revolution. “We’re poised right now to change the model,” she says. “The question is if we have the chutzpah to do it.”

Illustration by David Plunkert