Derek Thompson looked at the remarkable rise of the restaurant workforce:

• In 2017 jobs in restaurants have grown faster than those in healthcare, construction or manufacturing.
• This growth has been distributed across the nation, and is accelerating.
• Americans used to spend 25% of their food budget on restaurants in the 1950s. Today they spend 50%.
• Manufacturers used to employ three times as many people as restaurants in 1990. On current trends this will reverse by 2020.
• The charge is led by fine dining establishments that typically have a high number of staff at hand.
• Bars on the other hand serve a lot of people but employ relatively few.
• It’s not clear how great this is for the economy. The average private job pays $22.50 an hour, but for restaurants the corresponding figure is just $12.50.
• And the restaurant market may already be too saturated. Several chains are struggling to compete against all the competition.

Read more on The Atlantic.