Malcolm Bedell opened Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace in Thomaston with a clear vision: a chain of locations across Maine. One question keeps stopping him from moving forward. “Who’s going to run them?”
Maine’s worker shortage is rated “more severe” than most states. For every 100 open jobs, there are only 68 available workers.1 If you run a small business here, you already know this. What’s less obvious is why it keeps getting worse despite everything owners are doing to compete, and whether there are any levers left to pull.
What’s Driving the Shortage
One easy answer is demographics. Maine has one of the oldest populations in the country. Baby boomers are retiring at a pace that younger workers simply cannot match. That’s a real issue, and it’s been building for a decade.
But demographics alone aren’t the problem, especially in rural parts of the state. A December 2025 report from the Maine Center on Economic Policy found that while Portland and its surrounding area has seen per-capita economic growth of 39% since 2001, western and northeastern Maine have seen essentially none.2 That divergence matters because it tells you something about where workers go. Rural businesses don’t just compete for workers against other local employers. They compete against the pull of the city, and often lose.
A shortage of housing in rural areas intensifies this issue. Restaurant owners across midcoast Maine have said publicly that they can’t find or keep staff because workers can’t find affordable places to live nearby. You can raise wages, and many owners are doing exactly that, but a higher hourly rate doesn’t solve a 45-minute commute from the only town where someone can actually rent an apartment.
A Policy Change For The Worse
Approximately 30,000 immigrants are currently working legally in Maine across industries ranging from seafood processing to healthcare to hospitality. They represent about 4.6% of the state’s workforce. Proposed federal rules would limit work permit access for asylum applicants, extending waiting periods and potentially halting automatic renewals for workers whose permits are expiring.3
The Maine Chamber of Commerce has been direct about what this would mean: more jobs will go unfilled in a state that already has too many unfilled positions.
For small business owners who employ workers in this category, the uncertainty itself is a problem. It makes workforce planning difficult when you don’t know whether the employees you’re counting on for the summer season will have valid work authorization by the time the season starts. And unlike large corporations with HR departments and immigration counsel on retainer, most small businesses have no infrastructure for navigating that complexity.
Struggling To Find Fixes
There’s no shortage of advice for employers struggling to hire. Raise wages. Offer benefits. Create a great culture. Recruit from high schools. Partner with workforce development programs.
Most of this advice was written with medium or large employers in mind. When you run a five-person operation, “offer a competitive benefits package” is not a sentence that maps onto your reality. You don’t have the purchasing power to make health insurance affordable on your own. You don’t have an HR team to build out a structured onboarding program. You’re already wearing six hats before breakfast.
The Maine Tourism Association polled its members and found that 70% don’t have enough staff for their peak season. About 10% don’t have even half the staff they need. Faced with these numbers, some small businesses are turning to a different set of fixes: reducing the labor required to run certain functions, buying back time through automation, and building the kind of operational infrastructure that makes the employees they do have more effective.
Where Automation and Technology Are Filling the Gap
Scheduling, payroll processing, inventory management, customer follow-up, appointment booking: none of these require a human employee standing by. Software handles all of it, often at a fraction of the cost of a part-time hire. The hospitality businesses that have survived multiple lean hiring seasons in Maine tend to be the ones who automated their back-office functions years ago and are now running leaner operations with the staff they have.
Online ordering systems reduce front-of-house labor requirements. Self-service kiosks take pressure off retail counter staff during peak periods. AI scheduling tools optimize shift coverage against forecasted demand. None of these are replacements for skilled workers. They’re substitutes for the lower-complexity tasks that were pulling skilled workers away from the work they were actually hired to do.
The practical challenge for small business owners is identifying which tools are worth the investment for their specific operation and which ones are expensive distractions. That’s a harder question than it looks. A reservation system that works beautifully for a 60-seat restaurant may be complete overkill for a 12-seat lunch spot. The implementation cost, the learning curve, and the ongoing subscription all need to factor in against the actual hours saved.
If you’re considering automation investments to offset hiring pressure, start by mapping where your current employees spend time on tasks that don’t require human judgment. That’s your highest-return automation opportunity.
Help at the Legislative Level
Maine’s rural-urban economic divide isn’t going to close without policy changes, and the Maine Center on Economic Policy’s 2025 report makes a pointed case for what those changes should look like: stronger labor standards, expanded childcare access, investment in public-sector wages, and a robust safety net that doesn’t evaporate when federal priorities shift.
Childcare is one that doesn’t get enough attention in the small business context. Limited childcare access directly suppresses labor force participation, particularly for women in rural areas. In Northeastern Maine, women already earn 71 cents for every dollar paid to men. When childcare isn’t available or isn’t affordable, the people most likely to exit the workforce are the ones the labor market is already failing. Businesses then lose workers not because of anything related to the job itself but because of a supply chain problem that starts at 7 a.m. drop-off.
On the immigration front, the ask from Maine’s business community has been consistent: don’t accelerate work permit processing delays when the state is already short 33,000 workers. That’s not a partisan position. The Maine Chamber of Commerce and labor advocacy groups have said the same thing. The uncertainty created by shifting federal rules is itself a workforce planning cost that small businesses absorb disproportionately because they have the least capacity to adapt quickly.
If you run a small business in Maine and feel like no one is making this case on your behalf at the legislative level, the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the NFIB Maine chapter are both active on these issues and worth engaging with.
Footnotes
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Labor Shortage by State: Maine (2025) (reporting Maine’s worker shortage as “more severe,” with 68 available workers per 100 open jobs and approximately 33,000 positions unfilled statewide). https://www.uschamber.com ↩
- Maine Center on Economic Policy, State of Working Maine 2025: Strengthening Economic Opportunity in Rural Communities and Beyond (Dec. 2025) (finding 39% per-capita GDP growth in the Portland metro area from 2001 to 2023, compared to essentially flat growth in Western and Northeastern Maine over the same period). https://www.mecep.org ↩
- Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project of Maine; Maine Chamber of Commerce, Joint Press Statement (Dec. 9, 2025) (reporting that proposed federal rules would extend asylum applicant work permit waiting periods from six months to one year and halt automatic renewals, potentially affecting more than 30,000 authorized immigrant workers representing approximately 4.6% of Maine’s total workforce). https://ilapmaine.org ↩
