the job. He will soon be a lifeguard, watching
over the lazy river for $15 an hour, a couple of
bucks more an hour than Sahara Sam’s used
to pay.
“I’m looking forward to working,” said Miller, who
lives in Woolwich Township, New Jersey — so
much so that he got a friend interested, too: “He
was like, ‘Whoa, they are hiring at (age) 15?’ ”
At Curry Up Now, the restaurant pays $2 an hour
above the minimum wage, which is $15 or more
an hour, depending on the Bay Area location.
The chain is also offering a fund for teens to pay
for classes or books, as well as free Zoom classes
on how to manage money.
Kapoor concedes that young hires require
restaurant training and might not stick around
for long. But there are advantages to having
teens on staff. They are typically inclined to
persuade their friends to work or eat there,
giving Curry Up Now a stream of future workers
and customers. And they have updated the
restaurant’s music, adding more songs from the
’80s and ’90s as well as tunes from India and the
Middle East.
All that said, the revival of teen employment
might not last. The pre-pandemic trend
toward fewer young workers at restaurants
and entertainment venues could reassert
itself if the economy’s labor shortages are
eventually resolved.
Still, Harrington, director of Drexel’s labor
markets center, notes that “employers have
moved down the labor queue as the labor
supply of adults has become more constrained.”
If the economic recovery continues to reduce