SOLVING THE CHILDCARE PUZZLE WOULD BE A GAME- CHANGER FOR RESTAURANTS OPERATIONS
PHOTO: ENVATO
THE PERK IS STILL A RARITY IN THE BUSINESS, DESPITE ITS EXPECTED LABOR BENEFITS. BUT EFFORTS TO BRING IT WITHIN REACH ARE INTENSIFYING.
BY PETER ROMEO
J oe Guszkowski doesn’t work in the restaurant business, and that’s a good thing right now. As the father of an 8-month-old, he and wife Leigh Burmesch are struggling to find a place that can take care of son Will so Leigh can resume her freelance career as a video editor and animator. The plan had been to care for Will at home for his first year and then place him with a childcare service. But the place where they’d hoped to enroll him was now saying it couldn’t take the little guy until age 2; there likely wouldn’t be a spot for him until then. Now they’re hunting for alternatives, and it’s been a daunting adventure. “The best-case scenario is that someplace will be able to take him by the end of this year,” says Joe. Availability is just one of the challenges, though a big one. Told that the average cost of care is about $10,000 a year per child, Guszkowski demurs and says that would be at the low end of the prices he and Leigh have been quoted to date. “It’ll be just a little less than our mortgage,” he says. The cost raises the question of whether the benefits of a second income will be enough to justify the expense. It’s a dilemma you might expect Joe to hear constantly in the course of his workday; he’s a senior editor at Restau- rant Business, dealing daily with restaurants as he covers casual dining and technology. His sources have it even worse in their hunt for childcare. One of restaurant work’s peculiarities is its hours; you might start at 4 a.m. if you work for a place that does its own baking, or from 5 p.m. to midnight if you’re a server. Extremely rare are the care options that can accommodate a nontraditional workday. And, though journalism isn’t known for paying lavishly, Joe is presumably making more than he did while wearing
a cow suit to greet customers at a Chick-fil-A, as he did in one of his first jobs. “It would have been impossible,” he says of paying for care back then.
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS OCTOBER 2024
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