The reasons I’ve given would explain 5 million fewer people in the workforce. No idea how legit that estimate is though. The margin of error on job estimates seems to be huge like it’s actually somewhere between 3-7 million.
As far as what’s different now as opposed to two years ago with restaurants, that’s pretty simple too. The restaurants who keep losing workers have probably would have just closed in the before time. During this pandemic, they’ve been propped up by PPP loans.
I can’t think of any restaurant in my neighborhood that closed during the pandemic. However, several have opened in the last 18 months. New construction, taking over spaces from other businesses, taking over restaurants that closed before the pandemic. Right off hand, there’s probably a dozen new spots in my zip code of about 70,000 new people.