What this discussion doesn't take into account is what else changed during the pandemic. There's a lot of basing the lack of restaurant workers on the idea that people are staying home on unemployment. But there was expansion in the job market in other places. A lot of displaced service workers found better quality employment elsewhere due to growth in other sectors. There was a story early in the pandemic of a restaurant owner who flipped his staff into the healthcare industry because that was his brother's industry and they needed people answering phones, and handling billing, etc. That's just an example. There were other stories about businesses intentionally hiring unemployed service workers because it was the thing they could do during the pandemic "to help," and they turned out to be quality workers for their needs. Not everyone who was a line cook or a server wants or needs to still be a cook or a server. The competition isn't just unemployment, which has an end date. It's also the other industries that saw a glut of potential labor and picked out the best ones for themselves.
Restaurants might simply have to be faced with "restaurant work sucks," and they will have to do more about long-term wages and working conditions and not short term incentives. Am I reading correctly that FL's unemployment rate is at 4.7%, down from the pandemic high of 14.2%? That doesn't sound like a lot of people choosing to remain unemployed, as much as lack of people.
