With COVID-19 cases breaking records each day, the restaurant industry is entering 2022 in a very different place than operators would have guessed just a month earlier.
These surges come alongside already scheduled federal changes mandating new controls for vaccinations and testing. Starbucks told employees Monday (Jan. 3) that it would require all its United States employees to be fully vaccinated or to get tested each week, Reuters reported. A letter from the chain’s Chief Operating Officer John Culver informed workers that they will need to let the company know their vaccination status by Jan. 10.
The news comes as, in many parts of the United States, new guidelines are taking effect. Also on Monday, proof of vaccination mandates for indoor dining began in Chicago and Philadelphia, while in New Orleans, the existing mandate was extended to children ages 5 and up. While data from the federal government about how the omicron variant and these new mandates have affected restaurant sales will not be available until mid-February, anecdotal reports from local news outlets all across the country show temporary closures and other short-term measures as eateries feel the financial impacts of the spread.
Meanwhile, Monday’s new daily cases in the United States exceeded 1 million for the first time since the initial outbreak of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, the seven-day average of new cases in the country is nearly six times what it was at the start of December.
While vaccination and testing mandates for employees and customers alike go a long way toward protecting restaurant workers’ safety in public-facing roles, enforcing them comes with its own challenges.
“There’s a lot of anxiety,” Andrew Robbins, co-founder and CEO at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customer experience management (CXM) solutions provider Paytronix, told Karen Webster in an interview. “There’s anxiety from putting your frontline staff at risk, and you can put them at risk because of the [virus]. You can also put them at risk trying to enforce this stuff.”
Read more: Vaccine Mandates Are a Lose-Lose For Frontline Restaurant Workers, Says Paytronix CEO
Still, for all the skyrocketing new case numbers, restaurants will not find themselves in the position they were in with the initial outbreak in March 2020, when many restaurants were entirely reliant on indoor dining full of high-contact touchpoints. According to data from PYMNTS’ 2021 Restaurant Readiness Index, created in collaboration with Paytronix, 32% of sales for restaurants with table service came from digital orders last spring, and inside-the-restaurant, on-premise sales made up only 27% for these full-service restaurants.
See more: Restaurants Leverage Learnings From Previous Outbreaks to Take on Omicron
With digital tools checking for proof of vaccine, and with many restaurants offering own-device payment capabilities for both off-premise orders and on-, restaurants are far better equipped than they once were.
As Alex Lee, vice president and general manager of Resy and the American Express Global Dining Network, put it in an interview with Webster, “Especially in a COVID environment, where the beginning of your meal starts with worrying about your vaccination proof, and the end of your meal is going through payments, if we remove those two elements and the anxiety around them, we’re able to just focus on the dining experience.”
Read more: Dine-In Restaurant Recovery Hinges on Digital Experiences
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