Restaurants Doing Great Despite Economy

The chief executive of Restaurant and Catering Australia, John Hart, says every day out-of-work corporate types are plodding the pavements and knocking on the doors of Australia's cafes and restaurants looking to become waiters and waitresses.

"We've now started taking down those signs that you so often see in the windows because we're starting to get floods of people that are walking past restaurants and coming in looking for jobs," he said.

"They're people that are coming out of all sorts of industries, and particularly those that we understand to be on the decline like financial services and advertising.

"There's some great stories from people that have been in the country for five minutes through to those that have lost a pretty high-profile job and are now looking for work in one of our businesses.

"We like that sort of thing because we like people that have got personality and intelligence and they're always welcome."

Familiarity

He says many of those people waited on tables while getting their degrees.

"About 52 per cent of people have worked in our industry at some point in time," he said.

"What we're seeing now is those that have worked in the industry during their time at school or university are coming back to us and looking for a full-time position."

He says people are going back to what they know.

"The type of thing we're seeing is people saying 'well, we've got some experience in your industry at least, so we'll give that a try for a longer-term prospect'.

"This is rather than the types of things that they're being trained for like advertising and finance, where there just isn't the jobs at the moment."

Still dining out

He says despite the economic gloom and doom, people are still eating out, and the sector is growing.

"We grew by about 1 per cent in January and about 2 per cent in December," he said.

"There's no doubt that we've continued to grow, even through the downturn of late last year and the beginning of this year, we've kept growing, we've kept exceeding the result from last year."

He said it is an "amazing" trend.

"It just shows you how resilient the Australian attitude is to eating out," he said.

"Everyone still wants to go out and they still want to have a good time and they still want to enjoy themselves, and we just hope it continues."

Stimulus boost

He says he has no doubt that the Federal Government's first stimulus package helped the industry.

"The December stimulus package, we estimate was about $40 million in December and about another $40 [million] in January," he said.

"So we're certainly getting our cut of the stimulus package and we hope we'll get the same from the one that's coming out at the moment."

By ABC Australia.