Where I live is the same now hiring all over restaurants and stores. They are growing increasingly desperate too, even before the illegal alien amnesty issue failed. Running advertisements on the radio, even some on local tv channels. Giving 500$ signing bonuses.. and giving employees 500$ bonuses if they can get a friend to sign up and stay at least a certain length of time.
But they haven’t yet budged on the wages which are still rock bottom. I think its a psychological issue, just like the levitation act houses are pulling in some areas. Manages and business owners haven’t had to give low end workers a raise for 30 years, or an entire generation. Their entire careers. Even as inflation has made the same dollars worth about a fifth.
But at some point the dam will break. My family’s accounting practice we all along were extra generous and even moreso now, we never have problems finding people. But some other firms are getting desperate, yet again not willing to raise the wages big time.
Anyway I’m going to be interested to see once the dam eventually breaks, when companies have to outbid each other. You can see the impetus too, with government workers retiring, and young people getting into the good government jobs. Same thing is happening or going to happen with a lot of contractors. That makes less supply at the retail and restaurant level.
But in the second part of my comment I alluded that there is a "firing" overhang. In general managers and owners are overly reluctant to fire people. By having a reluctance to fire a society does itself no favors. It means that people are "trapped" in the the wrong or sub-optimal positions. Not being as fully productive as they might be.
There is significant governmental regulatory interference that causes this overhang. Employers fear -- some despise -- the increase in state unemployment fund fees that results (at least in the states I am familiar with) from terminations. There is an extraordinary excessive burden to the paperwork of replacing an employee with a new one. Then there is the psychological burden of firing.
Yet in some ideal of free-market economics, firing should be welcome -- for the employee because there is no fear of finding a new -- and better -- position or opportunity, and for the employer because of the hope of improving efficiency, and for everybody -- but firing should be win-win-win. Society wins when the number of "salt-mine" jobs are minimal.
In such a happy-to-fire-and-be-fired-thank-you environment people would move quickly to those roles in which they are happy and productive!