Chicken shortages hurt Myrtle Beach area restaurants. Local businesses rebuild after setbacks

Some businesses such as restaurants are still struggling from the effects of the pandemic.

Many restaurants were allowed to stay operational throughout the pandemic as they were considered essential. Businesses were not allowed to serve the public at full capacity, and now many businesses are facing distribution and supply chain issues and labor shortages.

One product that many restaurants have had trouble buying is chicken. Even corporate chain restaurants such as Buffalo Wild Wings had issues with supplying customers with their most popular menu item.

Bryan Compher, general manager of Buffalo Wild Wings in Carolina Forest, said the lack of supply became a problem when COVID-19 restrictions were removed in South Carolina.

“The supply is way less than the demand is, so getting chicken wings was very tough for say probably six or seven months last year when everybody started ramping back up and opening,” Compher said.

Compher said COVID-19 caused many chicken processing plants to shut down. The problem with that was most of the businesses that sold chicken products were still open. Buffalo Wild Wings has 1,200 stores in the company, and that doesn’t include the huge quantity of other restaurants serving chicken.

A popular local chain restaurant still struggling to keep up with the low supply and high demand is The Grumpy Monk. Madalyn Blevins, restaurant manager at the Broadway location said her restaurant is constantly dealing with a chicken shortage. She said this has caused cuts in labor costs because they have to spend more money on food.

Blevins said they’ve had to make menu changes several times to keep up with the rise in chicken prices.

“Since September it’s increased 22 percent,” Blevins said about chicken prices. “We had to change our prices for our wings like five times in the past two months. They just keep going up.”

Blevins said on top of the price increase, the chicken they do receive is different from what it used to be.

“The chicken tenders are smaller. The wings are smaller because they’re trying to get it out faster,” she said.

Compher said his store was able to receive emergency stocks from the processing plants in order to keep selling wings, but this wasn’t always enough security for them.

Compher said he was constantly unsure of whether his restaurant would be able to supply guests with what they wanted. He said there was never an idea of how much supply they would receive from their trucks, and he was left questioning whether he would have enough chicken for his restaurant.

He said they were lucky to also serve boneless wings because they could provide a substitute for customers on days when they had no chicken wings.

Although the supply was the main issue, the distribution also played a large role in many of these issues restaurants faced. Compher said he was always unsure of what supply their trucks would bring.

Although it’s one of the most popular brands in the chicken-serving industry, the Chick-fil-A of Carolina Forest did not face much supply or labor shortages. They were still affected by distribution issues. Sasha McRaven, Chick-fil-A manager, said they couldn’t get supplies many times during the pandemic because of infections in their distribution company.

“There were several times when the distributor got COVID, so that put a pause on some of our distribution,” McRaven said. “We couldn’t get any of our supplies because of the COVID outbreak in their company.”

The pandemic affected each business differently, but many businesses are still facing a labor shortage across the country. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rates have been on a steady decline since April 2020.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rates have reached 3.6 percent as of March 2022, and there are six million people unemployed. As of April 23, there have been 1.6 million unemployment insurance claims.

McRaven said her Chick-fil-A never furloughed any workers, so they are not as worried about finding new employees. However, The Grumpy Monk and Buffalo Wild Wings are currently short staffed and searching for new people to hire because they had to furlough much of their staff during the pandemic.

Blevins said she has enough servers, but not enough cooks, bartenders or hosts.

“It doesn’t matter how much we offer to pay them, nobody still wants to work. So, it’s hard to get people in here,” Blevins said.

She said the restaurant had to completely change the way it pays its workers in order to keep them employed. She said the hourly wage was raised for bussers and food runners, but they no longer get a percentage of servers’ tips. Instead, they now only receive the base pay.

Compher said the majority of workers he furloughed came back after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and were given bonuses for staying with the company. He said finding new employees is tough now because all the restaurants closer to Myrtle Beach are hiring and pulling in all potential employees.

Vanessa Phrakonkham, a server at Buffalo Wild Wings, kept working throughout the entire pandemic. She said part of the reason she kept working was because she was considered an essential worker and got paid an extra $2 from April to June of 2020.

“Working was honestly fun because on top of that extra pay an hour, people were tipping like crazy because they’re like ‘thank you so much for working during this time,’” Phrakonkham said.

The worst of the pandemic seems to be over, but businesses are going to take a long time to recover from the setbacks caused over the past two years.