Economic chaos in the college town that I live in:

1) My one retirement village employer who's traditionally been the good employer in town can't get enough people now, to the point where they plopped me down without any training or advance notice to be an emergency fill-in primary worker at an understaffed nursing home unit like two shifts in a row.

2) A bar/restaurant on the main drag that's been open almost two decades announced its closing, since business has been up and down throughout the pandemic and now most recently they can't get enough staff to be open more than 4 days a week and to have longer hours when they are open, so they just couldn't get back to turning a profit like they had been, where it made the business all worthwhile.

3) The local paper had an article about how 3 nursing homes in the county were fined for a high level of violation, 1 where a staff member became verbally and physically abusive to a resident apparently because they snapped because of overwork, and 2 where there wasn't adequate supervision going on, with 1 of those resulting in someone's change in condition not getting noticed in time and them dying.

4) A few days after that, the local paper had an article about how there's never been enough pharmacy techs because of low wages, but now the situation is particularly bad because of understaffing and overwork, so like 2 chain drugstores were suddenly reducing hours and cutting weekend hours, suddenly shifting prescriptions and customers to elsewhere on short notice.

5) A few days after that on an early Friday evening, I'm at the local chain pharmacy in my college town, and suddenly people are speaking up in the pharmacy area and saying they've been waiting a long time and where is she going to cut off the line in the line of cars waiting, "I'm in the black SUV," and this (like late 30s) (chubby) (black) woman comes out and is like, "I am very sorry, but we are taking prescriptions as they come, and we are now closing for the weekend."

6) That very same time, I'm standing in a long line waiting to get rung up since there's a shortage of counterpeople too, and I start talking to the woman next to me in line, and it turns out she's a nurse at the local major hospital system, and she says they have a backlog of 5,000 people waiting for procedures, and the shortage of people with healthcare licenses like mine is so bad, they're actually shifting LPNs around departments and making them do the lower level work to cover the gaps.

. . .

(And she agreed on me quitting my job, she said it probably wasn't worth the liability.)