Factories Are Still Giving Way to Restaurants

July was another fine month for jobs, with the unemployment rate falling to 4.3 percent, labor-force participation rising, and nonfarm payroll employment up by 209,000. The biggest story of Friday's employment report, as noted by the Hamilton Project (a Brookings Institution offshoot focused on economic growth), may have been that it marked the closing of the "jobs gap" that began to open up in November 2007. The gap was "the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needed to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who entered the potential labor force each month." Now, almost 10 years later, it's finally gone.

I have a habit of digging into the monthly employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in search of smaller stories than that. This month the story that leaped out at me from the page on nonfarm payrolls had to do with eating and imbibing. And it's actually not all that small a story, at least in terms of the number of jobs involved.