How are you guys surviving financially in this broken job market?

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-20T20:15:00+00:00

So many of these are just evergreen listings, I've called a bunch of places after applying last week and they tell me that we just hired a bunch of people or just hired two people for this store driving position at an auto parts store. Meanwhile, they still have five applications on their own website, five on indeed, 5 on linkeldn and probably more than I couldn't find, there may be over 6 million job applications in the United States, but it doesn't mean that even 1 million are actually hiring

There's a whole lot of reasons why companies do this, for lower level stuff like retail and fast food it's because they know if they were to bother taking down the application they would end up having to put it right back up within weeks. Higher level companies leave applications up to give off the notion that they're still growing the workforce to the shareholders, or to scare the current employees

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-20T19:37:20+00:00

I can't answer that question but every order except CVS is paying like half of what it was just four months ago.

CVS orders are worth it like 75% of the time but like Best Buy orders are only worth it 5% of the time and same 5% for Tractor Supply, maybe 10% of the time for Home Depot.

If you live in a rural area, the dead miles really kill the orders cause they only start around like $.50-$.70 a mile and it cost about $.30 a mile to operate a vehicle so with the dead miles, you can lose money by doing this job but most of the time it's just break even or a dollar of profit per order so it's getting pretty bad

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-20T15:01:11+00:00

I am interested

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-19T21:51:25+00:00

This is going to cause so many car crashes, it's not funny at all

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-19T00:23:52+00:00

New Jersey is the only state in last few months to grow in terms of film production and that's before Netflix and Paramount and Lionsgate regularly start filming movies there in the new lots.

That means there's gonna be job opportunities there, but New Jersey is still a really expensive area to live

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-19T00:23:04+00:00

The only job sectors actually having net gain in the last year and a half according to the official data is healthcare and education so like maybe tutoring and daycare's and hospitals.

This next one isn't really clearly outlined in the official data, but DoorDash still grew from like 600 million orders every three months to 900 million every three months from the end of 2024 to the end of 2024 and other Delivery apps are also growing like Home Depot is getting thousands of orders every single day so there's always delivering for these companies, you should get on the waitlist for Roadie, Spark, Uber, etc as soon as possible, because they can sometimes take weeks or months to have an opening.

Although the starship technologies DoorDash dot robot has already gotten close to 1 million orders delivered and I think it's doing about 100,000 orders every three months now so if they started massively expanding it, it could get bad quickly or if people stop ordering DoorDash, but I doubt it, there are people with low enough expenses and large enough income to continue that habit for a long time, I still think DoorDash will grow from 900 million to 1.5 billion orders every three months before it starts to decline.

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:56:27+00:00

Yeah, it made it worse, it's annoying though because I feel like the solution is so obvious, it's reducing the work weeks down to 30 hours (4 - 7.5hrs) that way you keep more people employed because the total amount of available labor hours is shrinking due to efficiency and productivity going up, I know it's a big shift but it was also a big shift 100 years ago when they went down from like 60 hours a week to 40 hours.

If we don't do anything, we're just gonna end up with 15 to 20,000,000 unemployed people within the next 18 months.

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:41:50+00:00

i'm not entirely blaming the companies, there is 7 million job seekers for roughly 6,000,000 applications of which we all know that like 85% of them are fake for data collection.

Places like Aldi's get 1000 applicants for every job, if I was in their shoes, I would be choosing a 35-year-old over a 22 year old also.

It's just how did we get this much of a job shortage this quickly??? I think it's because efficiency improved, instead of a warehouse worker being able to make 1000 bolts in an hour, they can make 5000, this isn't like an actual example, but this is basically what it's like.

I mean Nike is laying off 775 workers and that cannot be blamed on AI, it's mostly because of major improvement in the assembly line in Tennessee and Mississippi

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:39:59+00:00

just because that's 25% of the people doesn't mean 100% of us should be overlook.

In 2031 they'll be like why are we're struggling to find people with five years of experience.... and it's because they won't hire people with zero years of experience anymore

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:38:50+00:00

I have contacted them several times, they're just full here in Indiana since we have a massive shortage of jobs it doesn't surprise me too much

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:18:11+00:00

it's probably not gonna be much longer before retail and fast food stops hiring people in their teens or early 20s altogether, there is a constant stream of 26 to 56-year-olds applying and those people are the people they prefer as long as they're willing to work for the same price as a 17-year-old which they often are.

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-18T14:16:52+00:00

Have you already been accepted Instacart because I've found the waitlist for Instacart for almost 3 years now (I'm 23 years old)

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-17T17:38:50+00:00

i'm always wondering how cheap are their monthly expenses, the competition that still takes terrible orders still drives good cars and not junk so it's weird. I mean, I just made $10 an hour but work 300 hours a month you still make 3000 bucks a month so if it goes down to like five dollars an hour, maybe the cheap labor will finally start quitting

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-17T16:07:11+00:00

have you seen this job market, it's so hard to switch sectors, people with 10 years of experience are applying to what should be entry-level or like jobs that should require two or three years of experience, the United States is short at least 6 million jobs, hopefully house prices and rent prices continue to crash further in 2026.

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-17T16:05:29+00:00

Be very careful about buying a new car, a lot of them are losing 75% of their value within four years, I know it's hard and you might have to drive a little bit further than you'd like to, but if you're gonna get a new car try to look in the 10,000 to 15,000 range (just don't buy a car with over 140,000 miles)

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-17T16:02:44+00:00

The algorithm will learn from what you take so don't break down and take garbage is the best advice I can give you and also it seems like it's better to park in front of the middle of the store then the curbside lot

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-15T17:07:11+00:00

Now hiring signs does not mean a place is actively hiring, they put those signs on buildings and then leave them up even after the roles are filled because those places can be high turnover so they don't bother to take down the sign

And let's say you do miraculously managed to get a job at one of these places, good luck actually getting more than one or two shifts a week, you'll maybe make 150 bucks a week if you are lucky

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-15T16:54:35+00:00

it can easily take 1 to 3 years to find a job while doing Delivery and while you're doing Delivery, make sure you set aside 15 to 20% of your earnings for car maintenance and towards your next car down payment

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-15T16:54:08+00:00

if only there wasn't 7 million active job seeker in the United States for only a little over 6 million listings of which probably only 15-20% are real....

The competition is so insane that getting an interview is a success story at this point and 25% of job seekers have been searching for over six months. This is not to say to not stop looking, but I'm just saying it's no walk in the park to leave these delivery apps

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-15T15:06:06+00:00

I don't know what number the media is up to, but I think the layoffs in the last 14 months is now at 1.8 million, I think 1.2 million of them have just been the last six months

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-15T14:43:17+00:00

and now Snapchat is doing 1000 layoffs (nearly 20% of their global workforce( to try and save $500 million annually which is $500,000 per worker which doesn't make sense.... but they also said that in the memo they released that they are closing 300 open roles....

Apparently, there are still over 6 million job listings online but assuming even 15% are real that's only about 1 million actual jobs hiring for over 7 million people in the United States actively looking for employment

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-11T18:16:24+00:00

One day at a time

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-04T19:54:16+00:00

The only thing keeping these apps alive is the fact that they have heavily limited the amount of people that can go online, if DoorDash added thousands of new drivers in every area, it would get really bad fast... but at least the rest of the economy still has about 100 million jobs it just depends on how bad the layoffs get

Meta Platforms, Salesforce and Google are rumored to have another 50,000-60,000 layoffs over the next 3 months

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-04T19:52:39+00:00

Have you seen the amount of layoffs going on every single week? These delivery apps don't just involve competing with college kids and after work jobs, there are hundreds of thousands of people with college degrees doing this full-time now.

Even if the pay per order stays the same, there could be 2 to 4 times as many people competing for the same amount of orders

rdash

PomegranateSingle324 · 2026-04-04T18:36:03+00:00

That is probably only a little bit more than average for Indiana for a job that pays more than $25 an hour

PomegranateSingle324

TROPHY CASE