Valley businesses experiencing employee shortage amid COVID-19 surge

Feeling the pandemic's impact, a business in the East Valley keeps its door closed some days because it doesn't have enough staff.

GILBERT, Ariz. - Just as many Valley businesses were bouncing back from the pandemic, COVID-19 cases and concerns are going up again.

Feeling the pandemic's impact, a business in the East Valley keeps its door closed some days because it doesn't have enough staff.

The owner of Toasted Mallow in Gilbert, Tricia Arce, says this has been an ongoing problem since January.

"A lot of businesses are now remote. We lost a couple employees due to that and since then we haven’t been able to find anyone to employ within the store," she said.

At this point, they only have four employees working at the shop which specializes in shakes and flavored s’mores.

They are getting burnt out, literally.

"Make sure one is not overly working. So one is working at least like nine hours a day and then others eight, so they’re working pretty hard," Arce said.

At the moment, she isn’t sure what else to do.

The store is closed on Mondays but she's planning to open up shop again on Tuesday.

Job reports from this week show that fewer people are now filing for unemployment.
400,000 jobless claims were submitted this last week, down 24,000 from last week.