1) At the nearby chain pharmacy, I asked the manager who was checking me out what was up with the pharmacy issues, since I'd read about them in the paper and seen them there. He said that recruiting pharm techs had already been a national problem way before that story, but the pandemic made everything worse, since people retired and now new people haven't been coming up, since it's not all that much money and there's no room for advancement.
2) A (pleasant) (cognitive psych) Ph.D. student who I chit-chatted with outside at the local brewery was telling me that due to local pharmacy troubles, the only 24-hour pharmacy in town closed down a bit ago, and then the nearest one was a half hour away in a town to the east of here, but now that one closed, too, so the closest 24-hour pharmacy is now a two-and-a-half hours drive away.
3) The local community college in the town just east of here sent out a flier advertising wind tech jobs. Part of it might be that enrollment in hands-on tech courses dropped a lot during the pandemic and maybe they haven't been recovering so fast, but part of it might also be wages? The flier said entry-level was $19-23 with rapid advancement, so that's not all that much money for all of the training that you have to go through, and who knows if the promise of advancement is real, we've all heard that one before. I think the jobs used to pay a lot like 8-10 years ago, but it seems like it's yet another case where as the minimum wage has been bumped up, the jobs that were like a half step hire haven't kept pace, and are just stagnant.
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