The Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets are skating on virgin ice this spring. Or dribbling over fresh boards, depending on the sport in question.
Denver’s arena-sharing pro hockey and basketball franchises have never made it to the second round of their respective league playoffs in the same season before 2019. The final results of the teams’ postseason runs aren’t yet known (thanks to a Gabe Landeskog’s overtime goal Monday night) but one thing is for certain: bars and restaurants in close proximity to Pepsi Center have been packing in the patrons on game nights.
So far, this playoff season has netted 23 extra games for the two franchises, 12 of which have been played in Denver. Last week, the Pepsi Center hosted games on four consecutive nights. This week Monday and Tuesday both brought action to the Can.
“We are filled to capacity. We’ll get on a couple-page waitlist, at least. We have to put up (voicemail) messages once we’re full on reservations, or we’ll get them all day,” said Jasmine Nunez, manager at Brooklyn’s at the Pepsi Center, the closest sports bar by far to the arena. “They’re very profitable days.”
All that business passing through Brooklyn’s has required hustle, even more hustle than usual, Nunez said. The establishment has been running a staff of around 50 people on game nights, including more than 20 servers and eight bartenders. Finding the requisite help has required a lot of last-minute phones calls, late night email blasts and text messages.
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“Tonight, I have one of the manager’s wives working a beer tub. That’s how strapped we are on the floor,” Nunez said before the Avs game Monday. “I’ve had to make some servers’ sections bigger or even shut some sections down. You can only stretch yourself so thin before you’re not giving customers what they deserve.”
Brookly’s isn’t alone when it comes to labor need.
The Avs’ and Nuggets’ playoff runs are coming in the midst of a drum-tight job market — nationally, at the state level and in Denver. Colorado’s unemployment rate for March was 3.5 percent, according to Ryan Gedney, a senior labor economist with the state’s Department of Labor and Employment. It was just 2.9 percent for the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield metro area, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The service industry has always been a high-turnover business, with a lot of seasonal variation but online job posting figures demonstrate that early 2019 has seen the demand for bar and restaurant staff balloon.
According to data available through colmigateway.com, collected by a Colorado Department of Labor and Employment vendor, an average of 181 waiter and waitress jobs have been posted online in Denver in each of the first four months of 2019. That’s a 29 percent increase over the average monthly postings in the first four months of 2018. There were 229 open server positions posted in April alone. That’s the most since November 2015, according to the LMI Gateway numbers.
Similar trends were seen when it comes to cooks (a 24 percent increase in average monthly postings so far this year compared to the first four months of 2018) and bartenders (a 40 percent increase). The numbers are pulled from the web in real time and jobs sites are checked daily, according to the state’s LMI Gateway site.
Conversely, when looking at job postings at all “food services and drinking places” in Denver, total average monthly advertised openings have gone down 8 percent — from 838 to 769 — so far this year compared to 2018. Gedney theorizes that the discrepancy may come from industry segments such as fast food restaurants seeing flat growth this year but could not be sure.
Carolyn Livingston, spokeswoman for the Colorado Restaurant Association, said it’s hard to find a reliable source for real-time job openings in the industry, but anecdotally most operators she talks to say they are running their businesses below ideal staffing levels.
“Everyone is looking for line cooks, everyone is looking for dishwashers, but across the company, I think we’re doing well,” Beth Gruitch, co-owner of Denver restaurant company Crafted Concepts said of her employee needs Tuesday.
Crafted Concepts has five restaurants in its portfolio, all in the downtown area. Euclid Hall Bar & Kitchen on Larimer Square is the one that has benefited most from the Avs and Nuggets games. The beer hall serves late and has two bars to accommodate people popping in before the action, Gruitch said. The company has brought in extra servers — particularly since most of the games have started at 8 p.m. or later — to manage the traffic and hasn’t had any issues getting the help it needs, she said.
A key to having enough staff is retaining staff, Gruitch said. Crafted Concepts had made efforts to be “an employer of choice” by providing benefits like a 401(k) program. The company isn’t matching employee contributions but wanted to create an avenue for workers to start saving.
“We have a great working environment, and we want to set people up to be happy here,” she said.
Regardless of the challenges they have presented scheduling managers, many in the business community are celebrating these playoffs series as wins for the city at large.
“There really is no precedent for having two of our teams in the playoffs concurrently, but in general, sports are a huge economic driver for our city, whether through ticket sales, through the jobs they create, or through all of the peripheral spending that occurs during games in our downtown corridor,” Matthew Payne, executive director of the Denver Sports Commission, said in an emailed statement.
Brooklyn’s server Paul Lord is celebrating. The 35-year-old service industry vet has been scooping up playoff shifts whenever possible, something made easier, he says, by the fact many of his co-workers are college kids, some of whom have taken time off for finals during the playoff blitz.
“I’m trying to make as much money on these playoffs as I can,” Lord said. “These are the shifts you want. The money is better. The morale is better. It’s better for the guests, and it’s better for the city.”
