No news is good news, jobs edition

Daily Data: Where did all the white glove service go?

In today’s dispatch:

• News from the labor market is no news, and that is good

• Where did all the white gloves go?

• People going, people coming

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Wither High Touch Services?

Random Walk will be relatively brief today because I’ve been busy with a few other things.

The big macro news is basically that there was no news: the labor market continues to get ‘back to normal’ in the sense of ‘demand for workers is no longer so much higher than the supply of workers.’

That’s good, insofar as it means people-prices won’t get too expensive.

It’s less good, insofar as job growth is itself fairly tepid.

Mostly, it’s boring, and boring is good.

Missing that white glove finish

As a reminder, “high touch service” employment has only recently gotten back to where it was before the pandemic, and employers have already been paying through the nose for the scant “high touch service” employees they’ve been able to find (via BofA).¹

If we did suddenly need more high-touch services (and it’s pretty unlikely that we could afford them), heavens knows where we’d find the people to provide them.

You see now why services feel so much worse, and why no one can afford “fine dining” anymore (via NAR).

Full-service dining employment is still less than it was, and again, restaurants can barely afford the workers they have.

To be fair, you could also look at this and say “look at how much more catch up we have to do.” In other words, closing that gap could be a tailwind for growth.

Except again, where do the people come from and at what cost?

Out with the old, in with the new

Speaking of people, here’s something pretty remarkable.