Raising Cane’s Sending Large Portion of Corporate Employees to Work in Restaurants as Fry Cooks and Cashiers

Fast-food chain Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers is sending a significant number of its corporate employees to work as cashiers and fry cooks amid labor shortages.

Of the company’s 750 total corporate employees, 250 will work as fry cooks and cashiers while another 250 will move from marketing and training positions into restaurant jobs and recruiting positions, according to CNN.

The fast-food chain has 600 locations across 31 states and is deploying its corporate workers to locations around the country, according to a Fox and Friends interview with the company’s Co-CEO AJ Kumaran.

“We are all over the country now so, we have over 750, about, restaurant leaders,” Kumaran told Fox and Friends. “Whether that is in the field already or in the offices in Dallas, so they are all out in different places.”

“We have over 250 people now serving as fry cooks and cashiers, and also recruiting, holding job fairs, helping people orient all of it,” he added.

The company will pay for hotel rooms for relocated employees for one to two weeks, CNN reported.

The move comes on the heels of the disastrous September jobs report released October 8. While 500,000 jobs were expected to be created in September, only 194,000 were created.

Raising Cane’s has added 5,000 employees this year and has plans to increase the number before Christmas.

“So we have 40,000 crew members now, we came into this year with about 35,000, so we were able to create 5000 jobs,” Kumaran told Fox and Friends. “We thought it would be fun to create another 10,000 jobs between now and Christmas, so we said 50,000 crew members in 50 days, that is adding about 25 percent new crew members into our system.”

Ainsley Earhardt of Fox and Friends asked Kumaran, “Why is it so hard to find workers?”

“You know honestly Ainsley it’s just tough times these days,” he said. “I never even imagined operating in an Atmosphere like this.”

“The supply chain is a challenge, all of the products are going up,” Kumaran said. “Chicken prices for us are through the roof and wages have gone up almost 20 percent just this year alone.”

Kumaran announced that the company plans to invest another $70 million in wages over the next few weeks which will increase hourly workers’ wages by 15 percent to 22 percent, according to CNN.