Small businesses throughout North Carolina are experiencing staffing difficulties for a variety of reasons. Hiring crunches are causing many problems with the consumer experience. The lack of staff is affecting the hours of availability for local businesses. 

Joe Hargitt, owner of King’s Restaurant says that they are in desperate need of reliable employees.

“I ran a Facebook ad about 5 weeks ago about hiring,” said Hargitt. “I said I’d pay people $9/hr to come to work and if they stayed more than 30 days I’d raise their pay by one dollar.”

The increase in salary did increase the number of applications and of people who applied. 

“I had 70 people respond, I set up 60 interviews, I had 40 people show up for the interviews, I hired 20, and I have two left,” said Hargitt. 

This is the case for many small businesses in Kinston and across the country.  

Joe Strickland, manager at Pizza Villa, says “[the customers are] still coming. But we still don’t have enough help so everyone has to work more. Everybody’s working a lot of hours.” 

Strickland noted that because of the short supply of hands-on deck, Pizza Villa is now forced to close on Mondays. 

Lovick’s Cafe is another Kinston classic that will start closing on Mondays as of July 1, 2021.

“The last five or six months have been hard on all our great employees and us,” said Steve and Christine Lovick in a post on Facebook. “We have struggled like every other small business, and our 12-15 core employees have pulled together, but I'm pushing them to their limit at 50-55 hours a week each.”

Strickland says that on the days he’s supposed to get off at 4:00 pm, he won’t get home until 8:00 pm or 9:00 pm. 

Hargitt says that pre-pandemic potential employees would come in every other day filling out applications, but from March 2020 to May 2020, there were zero, and it hasn’t gotten much better. 

“Before the pandemic, we had 150 people working for us and now we have 90,” says Hargitt. 

These numbers may seem shocking but are average considering King’s size. Pizza Villa reported that until a week ago they were down 10 hands and Lovick’s wrote they are usually down five to seven.