Domino’s Pizza CEO Ritch Allison has told the CNBC’s Jim Cramer the American restaurant business is hurt by the slowing of immigration into the country.
“It’s an uphill climb. It’s a challenge in the U.S. with minimal population growth organically, we have a problem require the immigrants in our industry in order to keep having sufficient team members,” Allison said on “Mad Money.”
“Folks who want to work hard, want to stay with the business for a long period of time, can end up being owners and entrepreneurs,” said the CEO said. “As I travel across the country and speak to our franchisees, a lot who followed thatpath, it’s uplifting. … It is truly.”
Allison’s remarks on Thursday came as Pizza chain released its third quarter results which beat Wall Street’s expectations of earnings per share but coming up short of the same store sales and revenue. Its U.S. same-store sales actually fell at the beginning of the past decade declining 1.9 percent year-over year basis.
Domino’s has attributed a portion of the dip in domestic sales to the difficulty of acquiring workers to staff its stores. This was the latest instance of companies raising awareness of the challenges in filling vacant positions after the recovery of the economy from a recession caused by pandemics.
In his Friday morning email for CNBC Investing Club members, Cramer wrote: “The labor shortage issue is VERY serious… need more births and immigration, according to DPZ CEO Ritch Allison last night on Mad Money.”
Reminiscing about the conversation that Allison had with Allison, Cramer said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday that the conversation was “shocking” and “sobering.”
“Ritch Allison started, I think, a conversation that we’re all going to have to talk about,” Cramer declared. “We do not have a population increase in the United States. … But , more importantly is that he’s saying we have stopped the flow of immigrants. We have stopped this, however the best aspect of our country is that when immigrants are welcomed and become drivers. In the next moment, they have Domino’s. Domino’s or two, and later they own multiple locations. This is the end of. It’s time to begin planning an immigration policy that includes the admission of individuals.”
“Think about this. What kind of debate is in the past when, not too many years ago, an notion was that we needed to stop people from coming in,” Cramer continued, making reference to former president Donald Trump’s hardline stance on immigration.
In 2016, the year that Trump won the presidency net international migration added just under one million to U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. In 2019, that figure decreased to a record lower of only 595,000.
As per the data from the 2020 Census that was released in 2020, it was reported that the U.S. population grew by 7.4 percent between 2010 to 2020 This is the lowest rate of growth in the past 30 years, since the nation was undergoing the turmoil in the Great Depression.