The U.S. labor market has picked up in 2024, churning out more jobs per month on average than before the pandemic, and leisure and hospitality job growth is playing a big role.
“There are lots of reasons to be bullish about this ,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “We’ve had a really great start for the stock market and almost a full year of real wage growth and that’s causing a wealth effect.
Brent Frederick, who owns five restaurants in Minneapolis and St. Paul, has hired 40 people in the past month. “We actually have a massive gap relative to the pre-pandemic trend at a time when the U.S. household wealth has gone up like 40 percent,” said Pollak, the ZipRecruiter economist. “And it’s those people who mostly consume leisure and hospitality. So there’s plenty of demand, and there’s plenty of room for growth.”The industry has also been changing, with restaurants following remote-work customers who moved to suburbs from cities.