Well over 5 years ago, we first dubbed the economy under Barack Obama as the "Waiter and Bartender recovery", because while most other job categories had grown at a moderate pace at best, the growth in the category defined by the BLS as "Food Service and Drinking Workers" has been nothing short of spectacular.
How spectacular? As the chart below shows, starting in March of 2010 and continuing through April of 2017, there have been 86 consecutive month of payroll gains for America's waiters and bartenders, an unprecedented feat and an all time record. Putting this number in context, total job gains for the sector over the past 7 years have amounted to 2.345 million or just under 15% of the total 16.3 million in new jobs created by the US over the past 86 months.
As a tangent, putting the "waiter and bartender" recovery in the context of America's manufacturing sector, the following chart shows that while nearly 800,000 "food service and drinking places" jobs were created since 2014, over the same period the number of manufacturing jobs created has been just 105,000.
Source: BLS
