Where Overstaffing Actually Hides (It’s Not Where You Think)
When operators think about overstaffing, they picture the obvious stuff:
Servers standing around during a dead shift. Cooks leaning on the line. Labor you can see.
That kind of overstaffing is easy to spot—and usually easy to fix.
But that’s not where most labor-related cash loss actually lives.
The real drain hides in the parts of your schedule that feel normal.
The shifts that “have always been that way.”
The hours that seem reasonable—until you do the math.
Here’s where to look.
1. Prep Hours
Prep is one of the most common places labor quietly gets out of sync with sales.
Most prep schedules are built by habit, not by volume.
“We always do three hours of prep on Monday morning.”
But does Monday need three hours?
If Monday sales are 20% lower than Friday sales, does prep scale down accordingly—or does it stay the same no matter what?
In a lot of restaurants, prep is treated as a fixed block on the schedule. It doesn’t flex with expected sales. That means you’re overstaffed on slow days and, in some cases, still scrambling on busy ones.
Same labor. Different results. Extra cash gone on the slow days.
2. Opening Shifts
Opening shifts are often staffed for what might happen instead of what usually happens.
You schedule an extra person at open because one time—six months ago—you got slammed at 11:15. So now you carry that extra coverage every day.
Two people there at 10:30.
First real wave doesn’t hit until 11:45.
That extra 30–45 minutes per day, five days a week, doesn’t feel like much. But it’s paid time with no corresponding sales—and it adds up fast.
3. Slow Weekdays
Tuesday’s schedule looks like Wednesday’s.
Wednesday looks like Thursday.
But are those days actually the same?
In most restaurants, there’s a 15–25% difference between the slowest weekday and the middle of the week. If you’re scheduling the same hours for all three, you’re overstaffed on the slow day.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to matter.
Every single week.
This is how “good” labor percentages still produce thin cash.
4. Lunch-to-Dinner Transition
The space between lunch and dinner is a dead zone in a lot of restaurants.
Lunch rush ends around 1:30.
Dinner doesn’t really start until 5:30.
That’s four hours.
How many people are on the clock during that window?
Is it the minimum needed to handle the occasional walk-in—or is it whoever’s there for their full shift, plus whoever’s clocking in early for dinner?
Overlap hours are some of the hardest to see because no one feels idle. But hours without volume still cost cash.
5. Closing Shifts
“We need two closers” becomes policy.
Not because someone ran the numbers—but because that’s how it’s always been done.
But do you really need two every night?
What about Monday through Wednesday?
What if one closer with a slightly longer shift could handle it?
Closing is often scheduled by template, not by need. And templates don’t adjust for volume.
The Pattern
Notice what all of these have in common.
Prep. Opening. Slow weekdays. Transitions. Closing.
They’re the parts of the schedule that feel fixed.
They don’t get questioned.
They don’t get adjusted week to week.
They’re background noise.
And background noise costs money.
This is why operators can hit their labor percentage and still feel cash-tight—something I wrote about in the last post (The Cash Flow Problem Hiding Behind “Good” Labor Percentages).
The issue isn’t one bad shift.
It’s lots of reasonable decisions that never got calibrated.
How to Find the Hidden Cash
Pull your schedule from the last four weeks.
Don’t look at the weekly total yet. Look at each day.
For each day, ask:
What were sales?
What were total labor hours?
What’s the ratio between the two?
You’ll usually see it immediately.
Slow days carrying nearly the same hours as medium days—even though sales are 20% lower.
That gap?
That’s where the cash is hiding.
The Fix
The fix isn’t to slash hours randomly or squeeze your team.
The fix is to tie labor hours to expected sales, day by day.
If Monday projects $2,800 and Friday projects $4,200, those days should not have the same number of labor hours. The schedule should flex.
But that only works if you have a number—a multiplier that converts projected sales into target hours.
Without that, you’re guessing.
And when operators guess, they guess high.
Every time.
That’s why labor percentage doesn’t help you schedule (Why Your Labor Percentage Doesn’t Tell You What to Schedule). And it’s why cash quietly walks out the door even when the numbers look “good.”
Kwan Howard helps independent restaurant operators stop leaking cash — and make better weekly decisions about labor, scheduling, and operations.
Download the free guide:
Before the Schedule: The Cash Cost of Guessing
