Anyone who’s gone anywhere in the past few months in the Sedona area knows there is a shortage on workers.
Restaurants, hotels and retail shops large and small — both those with huge marketing budgets, little mom-and-pops and beloved holes-in-the-wall — have all fallen victim to the lack of staff.
Some businesses, especially restaurants and service-focused facilities, have had reduced hours or closed midweek due to a lack of staff. Retail shops have cut back hours, had owners working more and longer hours, with some even posting signs reading, “Sorry for the delay. We are short-staffed. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Potential factors, mostly related to COVID-19, the lockdown, reduced business operations and budget losses, are numerous.
In some cases, such as the highly competitive restaurant industry in Sedona, some workers have either quit or not returned back to their pre-pandemic jobs because they were able to instead take jobs in other, higher-paying businesses, or those offering benefits or incentives.
In some cases, workers chose to go back to school, which they may have put off after high school or before having children or entering the job market, and used the benefits offered by governments during the pandemic to help pay for their education. Some cut back their hours while others left the job market entirely.
Some workers are shifting career fields, going to jobs that offer more stability than the service industry, which was shut down first by Sedona’s mayor for a week and then by the governor of Arizona for a month, only slowly clawing its way back to normal working levels after more than a year.
Endemic to Sedona and the Verde Valley, scores of new residents fled major cities, moving here to work remotely or just to get out and are causing housing prices to skyrocket.
Local property owners are then willingly selling their homes at above-market prices and cashing in.
This uproots long-term renters in many cases, who have seen their rents jump from $1,200 a month to $3,000. Other homes get converted into short-term rentals. Booted renters have decided over the last year that rather than hunting for a new local place, that there are simply other places in America to live with reasonable rents, better-paying jobs and more community opportunities.
Some workers are indeed taking advantage of increased unemployment benefits offered by the state, supplemented by the federal government, and opting not to work. While this one seems like the easiest explanation, increasing state and national employment numbers undercut it.
Psychologically, most people are not logical creatures who coldly calculate a cost-benefit analysis of unemployment checks versus working a job. Rather, the American work ethic drives most people to equate work of any kind with productivity and meaning. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that most workers who want a job in the Sedona area have one — or two or more — and have no trouble finding work. The problem appears to be there are just fewer workers joining them.
That said, our reporters are working on a story on this issue. Reporter Ron Eland and Scott Shumaker are looking for your stories about the ease or difficulty of finding a job, the struggles that the business you manage or work for has had higher hiring and keeping staff, what benefits or incentives you offered or may have been offered to work and how your pandemic year, and post-pandemic return to work, has been in Sedona’s fluctuating job market.
Ron Eland can be reached at 282-7795 ext 121, or by email to reland@larsonnewspapers.com Scott Shumaker can be reached at 282-7795 ext 117, or by email to sshumaker@larsonnewspapers.com.
