“Regretably [sic], due to the economy,” and other signs of the times.

The Salvation Army Thrift Shop on SE Grand seemed a promising destination.

Turns out, it’s closed.  The sign could have simply read “This location closed.  Please visit our other location” etc. — but significantly, the reason behind its closing is emphasized, perched at the top.¹

There are several store-closing signs I’ve walked by in the past few weeks, though this one was most overtly Recession.  Just about everyone I meet in all the miscellaneous people-meeting ways has been laid off.  In a grocery store the other day, the cashier apologized for taking a while with the guy in line ahead of me:  turns out she was trying to get her buddy a job there, as he was just laid off by “you know, one of those big fancy hotels downtown?” where he had been making “a lot.”  As she rang up my cheese, the cashier told me that her friend was Not going to be able to maintain his lifestyle.  She wasn’t sure, she said, what exactly he was going to do, but it wasn’t looking good.  It sounded like pretty soon he might not be able to pay rent.

Then there are the people from whom I’ve gotten Craigslist furniture.  The first, a girl who sold me a superb antique lamp, then threw in the several-weeks-ago-mentioned green blender.  She was moving out of Portland because nothing, Nothing was turning up.  She had sent out at least fifty resumes, she said, only to find that just one of the fifty places had something to offer — and it was a porn shop.  She wasn’t above that or anything, she assured me, but, hell, it made her realize it was time to head back to California and move in with her mother — even though she hadn’t lived there since age fifteen.  She had a lot of experience, she told me, but it didn’t seem to matter.  Portland wasn’t letting her live here.

Then there was the chick from whom I got a bookcase, some odds+ends.  She said she was laid off from her last job and hadn’t been able to find anything since.  After a few months of traveling along the west coast, she said, maybe, just maybe! she’d come back to a Portland with jobs.

The one from which she’d been laid off?  Of all things:  a bike shop.

Nothing could be sadder, I think, than someone in Portland being laid off by a bike shop.  There are thousands of bikes here.  She’s a mechanic.  The idea that a bike shop was suffering enough to let go of a mechanic seems the least “Portland” thing imaginable.

Finally, there’s the girl I’m now friends with from the plane ride here.  Sitting next to me at JFK, my Plane-Friend-Turned-Real-Friend asked whether I wouldn’t mind chatting, as she was afraid of flying.  (Just her luck:  so am I. . . .)  We ended up talking for a long time.  Since returning to Portland after a year on a Fulbright, she had found zero employment over the course of four months.

Seriously.  A Fulbright!  The girl’s got something on her resume that (a) at the very least, looks good and makes it seem that one is smart, and (b) in this case, is in fact related to her being very smart — and yet she’s been turned away by everyone.  A year ago, she said, she had no problem getting job offers — so many, she had her pick.  Now, with a prestigious scholarship under her belt, she had nothing lined up.  And not for lack of trying.

Finally, two weeks ago, she emailed to tell me she had a bite.  The place that bit?  Abercrombie, in the mall.

Striving to do anything in the way of employment, she scurried over, despite the dread.  As she’d feared, they had her work alongside “dumb high school kids,” then snapped at her for measuring a mannequin “incorrectly” (um, she studied neuroscience), and gave her a measly THREE hours for the whole week.  They really did.  They hired her to work just three hours over the course of seven days.

None of this is uplifting, I know.  And I also know that talking about the economy right now is much like talking about the weather.  It’s there.  It’s obvious.  You can open your window or walk down the street and see it almost immediately.  Some might say, “Why bother talking about the [weather] [economy]?  We know already!”  But the unemployment rate in pdx is now almost three points higher than the national (and of course both rates don’t account for the many thousands of unemployed people who aren’t caught by the rate calculation, including yours truly).  Yes, Portland has for a long time now been notorious for job problems:  too many overqualified types vying for the same positions.  But although they’re anecdotal, the stories of the people I’ve met in just a few weeks here make it pretty clear that it’s getting worse.  For a lot of people, it’s not just hard:  it’s gotten downright ridiculous.

In sum:  this shit ain’t good.
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1.  Searching to make sure I had the SE Grand address right yielded this funny/sad coincidence:  the Portland Mercury noted the closing of this selfsame store on its blog, using a photograph nearly identical to the one above, which I took a few weeks ago.  It’s clear from comparing the two that sometime between January and March the sign was ripped down and re-posted on the thrift shop’s door.  In addition, beneath the Mercury’s image is the following:
Send your recession pics to news@portlandmercury.com.

Recession pics.  Almost sounds nice that way!
But nope:  still terrible.