The labor shortage is the biggest challenge he faces as the restaurant manager, he said.
Garrett Reed, the CEO of Layne's, told Insider in a separate interview that he would "usually have at least a handful of seasoned managers, people in their late 20s, early 30s," running his eight restaurants but that the labor shortage led him to promote three workers who are 18 or 19 to manager roles, including Cabrera.
Reed said that he'd found it "tough to compete" with places like Walmart and McDonalds that can afford to offer higher wages and that many of his workers had left to join bigger companies.
Cabrera insisted that a lack of staff had not led to a drop in standards. "I make sure when I do my interviews and whatnot people know that I have high standards," Cabrera told Insider. He said he looks for staffers who care about the quality of service and work with urgency.
Cabrera's annual earnings are far above the $9.50-an-hour "learning wage" that Reed said his entry-level employees received and the $28,860 a year that the average 16- to 19-year-old in the US can expect to make, according to Labor Department data.
His salary doesn't include any performance-linked bonuses that general managers might receive at the end of the year.
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Cabrera said he'd struggled in past jobs to be taken seriously because of his age but had embraced the responsibilities of his new role.
"Just knowing that anything that happens inside of that store is on me," he said. "Anything that goes wrong, anything that goes right, it all comes back to me."
Cabrera told Insider that he was saving up to open his own Layne's franchise. "I just want to see how fast I can get there," he said.
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