In western Pennsylvania, halfway through one of those classic hazy March days when the worst of winter has passed, but the bare trees tilting in the wind tell everyone spring is yet to come, Darren Mattern was putting in some extra work.
Tucked at a corner table inside a Barnes & Noble cafe in Logan Town Centre, a sprawling exurban shopping complex in Blair County, he tapped away at two laptops. His work PC was open with notes on his clients: local seniors in need of at-home health care and living assistance, whom he serves as a registered nurse. On his sleeker, personal laptop he eyed some coursework for the master’s degree in nursing he’s finishing so he can work as a supervisor soon.
Mattern, warm and steady in demeanor, says the “huge blessing” of things evident in his everyday life at 35 — financial security, a home purchase last year, a baby on the way — weren’t possible until recently.
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He had warehouse jobs for most of his 20s, making a few dollars above minimum wage (in a state where that’s still $7.25 an hour), until he took nursing classes in the late 2010s. Shortly after becoming certified, he pushed through long days in a hospital during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic at a salary of $40,000. Today, he has what he calls “the best nursing job pay-wise I’ve ever had,” at $85,000.
Mattern’s trajectory is one bright line in a broad upward trend that hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians, and millions of other Americans, have experienced since the pandemic recession — a comeback in which unemployment has been below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s, small-business creation has flourished and the stock market has reached new heights.
There’s a disconnect, however, between the raw data and a national mood that is somewhat improved but still sour. A surge in average weekly pay and full-time employment has helped offset the demoralizing effects of a two-year bout of heavy inflation as the global economy chaotically reopened. But it has not neutralized them.
Mattern — mentioning families of patients he knows who are just getting by, and his annoyance with the rising price of produce since 2020 — grades the economy as a “6 or 7 out of 10” — “a C,” he said.
In West Philadelphia, in wealthy suburbs near Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, in Appalachian farmlands, in old industrial towns and in the middle-class townships nestled between, Pennsylvanians seem bitten with nostalgia for 2019: its lower prices, its lower interest rates, its location as the last reference point of normality before a series of volatile years.
In a shift that closely mirrors wage movement in the nation at large, almost 1 in 2 Pennsylvania workers made less than $15 an hour in 2020, but in 2023, roughly 73% made above that level. From 2020 to 2023, the median hourly wage in the state rose from $16.50 to $19.85, a 20% jump.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100 in January 2020 has about the same purchasing power as $120 now, a 20% cumulative increase. So until last year — when inflation-adjusted wage gains turned positive as inflation slowed — that wrestling match between prices and pay raises had often fought to a draw.
In 2022, Melody Hittle was making $12.50 an hour at a beach hotel in her hometown, Long Neck, Delaware. Now 23, she moved to State College, Pennsylvania, six months ago to be near her partner — living out of her car and spending some nights in his dorm until she found a small place to rent for $900. She has a job with benefits as the late-shift concierge at a local hotel, making $18 an hour, a 44% rise in pay from 2022.
But Hittle winces at groceries costing them $400 a month, and interest rates that make the idea of financing a new car in the coming years feel out of reach. (A Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculator that uses state and county level data to assess affordability puts the “living wage” in the State College area for an adult in 2024 at $23.15 an hour.) She has followed online debates about attitudes toward the economy and thinks some don’t reckon enough with “where people are starting from.”
Some may see her gains in relative terms, she said. And they may ”think, ‘Oh well, I only added 12% to my portfolio in the last year, so that’s great’ — but you also started with a base of $100,000, or $500,000, or $1 million,” she said. “I don’t have that advantage.”
Nostalgia for 2019
Some 64% of Pennsylvanians responding to a Quinnipiac poll in early January described their financial situation as excellent or good; 24% characterized it as “not so good,” and only 9% called it poor. But in the same survey, only 33% of Pennsylvanians described “the state of the nation’s economy” as excellent or good.
Vocal frustration with more expensive gas and food, rent-raising landlords and premium-raising insurance companies still animates small talk among friends. Home prices have soared, a blessing for homeowners but a curse for those seeking to join their ranks. Child care and elder care costs, rising before the pandemic, are still ascending. (And beyond needs like auto insurance, there is annoyance with the $4 bag of chips in the checkout aisle, or a $10 pint of beer that used to be $7.)
The most popular measure of national consumer sentiment, tracked by the University of Michigan since 1978, has reached its highest level since July 2021, before the worst of inflation hit. But sentiment hasn’t fully recovered. It remains suspended halfway between its all-time low in June 2022 — when inflation topped at 9% — and its peak in the 21st century, around New Year’s Eve 2019.
“Trying to make yourself happy is difficult,” said Lindsay Danella, an Altoona, Pennsylvania, native.
At 39, she recently left a job making over $70,000 as a general manager at a hotel where she said executives dealt with understaffing during and after the pandemic by asking managers like her to do more of everything without offering more flexibility or pay.
Now, as a server at Levity Brewing in downtown Altoona, she makes the legal subminimum wage for tipped workers in the state, about $3, but says she has found ways to “love it” despite that low base. Business is good, so tips are plentiful on weekends. And the taproom, which opened in 2022 in a remodeled space with floor-to-ceiling windows, is part of a district that has been revitalizing since 2021.
After feeling overworked and burned out since 2020, she has been able to step back in her new job and spend more time with her daughter, sharing parental duties with her ex-husband.
It also helps that, like most of the 70% of Pennsylvanians who are homeowners, Danella has been protected against rent inflation thanks to her low-cost, fixed-rate home mortgage payment. But many family members and friends in her network, who consider themselves relatively fortunate as she does, have been feeling somewhat unmoored since the pandemic.
So many, she explained, have had “a midlife crisis” — a spate of people changing jobs, shifting relationships, managing children through “Zoom school,” adjusting to a move or being unable to afford one because of higher interest rates, all while facing a whirl of new expenses.
“It feels like someone put us in a long rinse cycle in a washing machine,” she said, “and forgot to take us out.”
Places Where Some Feel Left Behind
Plenty of indicators in Pennsylvania point to economic health. New-business applications from expected employers were up 38% from 2021 to 2023 compared with those from 2017 to 2019. The unemployment rate is 3.4%.
But most people “don’t worry about broad state-level or national-level trends,” said Joshua Mask, a labor economist at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Most people’s understanding of the economy is going to be their own little world.”
Mike Brown, 53, a tradesman from Tower City, has mostly witnessed decline within his part of Appalachia in Schuylkill County.
A fully employed machinist at a time when he sees fewer and fewer like him, he assigns blame for the decadeslong falloff in solid manufacturing jobs to outside forces: large corporations, foreign labor and domestic leaders who he thinks “went wild with free trade.”
“A lot of people made good money,” he said. “And it just seems like the people were making too good of money, so it was one of them things where they said, ‘Well, if we take this to China, we can then not pay these high-priced machinists to do this work, and we can get the Chinese to do it for real cheap.’ And that pretty much undercut our whole trade.”
Schuylkill County’s aging and shrinking population is in the state’s coal region, where the rise of alternative fuels and of cheap shale natural gas unearthed in nearby counties has cost jobs in traditional mining and extraction. (To the west, the Homer City Generating Station, the largest coal-fired power plant left in the state, was decommissioned in July.)
Brown decided to commemorate the manufacturing and mineral-driven days of prosperity with the name of the local car wash he owns: Anthracite — “as in Anthracite coal,” he says.
Perched on a hill along West Grand Avenue, the main street in Tower City, Anthracite Carwash sits opposite Brown’s brick house, which he recently renovated. Adjacent is a charming stretch of churches, rows of white, light pink and blue two-story houses with neat porches, and a cluster of old corner stores still hanging on.
“But people ain’t rich here,” said Brown, who rates the economy as worse than it was in 2019. “Stuff’s kind of falling down.”
Doing Well, but Feeling for Others
Enjoying a night out in the up-and-coming Pittsburgh neighborhood of East Liberty, Matt Cillo, 25, said everything was just fine for guys like him. He has a good apartment and well-off friends. An engineering major, he now works in quality control for a major corporation that offers solid benefits.
“But I feel bad saying the economy’s good,” he said, “because it’s obviously still hard for a lot of people.”
At the state’s opposite end in Philadelphia, the skyline is grazed with cranes. And there is a steady stream of renovations to the homes and businesses to the west of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.
That redevelopment is frequently viewed by some residents as unwanted gentrification. For a city where 1 in 5 people are in poverty, the idea of a longer-term structural improvement competes with the immediate worry of rising rents.
Many longtime homeowners like Donald Woods, 68, a retired firefighter who lives near Malcolm X Memorial Park, are insulated from those concerns. The house he bought in his leafy area of West Philadelphia in 1999 for roughly $76,000 is now worth multiples of that. His stock portfolio is up, and he has a pension earned in his firefighting days.
“I’m good,” he said recently at the corner of 51st Street and Haverford Avenue, a favorite hangout, just west of where West Philly has grown hoity-toity. But like many, he stands in solidarity with those feeling less secure.
He mostly worries about the discouraged young people he sees, with or without degrees, languishing in jobs with pay that he thinks is worth less than what he earned in his youth without a degree.
In one of his best gigs, he remembers working for a local trucking company in his late teens in the mid-1970s, making $10 an hour (what amounts to $66 an hour today, adjusted for inflation). He drives a bus now Monday through Thursday for $20 an hour — not for the money, he says, but because he can’t imagine “sitting around waiting to die.”
Woods is known as “The Rib Man” in the area, for his brief but legendary run operating a barbecue food truck. Starting in 2018, pausing during the pandemic and ending in 2022, Woods enjoyed the hobby and the community paid him handsomely for it, with plates often selling out within an hour of opening time.
He argues that operating during the height of inflation taught him that the stories many business owners tell about why they have to raise prices, or limit wage increases, are often conveniently self-interested: “Most of them are true — some of them aren’t,” he said.
Like others, Woods had to deal with the increase in fuel and meat prices, but he said that he still had plenty left over to pay the person working the window $25 an hour.
He remains unimpressed that many stores and other places have jumped to paying workers around $15 an hour. “What are you supposed to do with that?” he said. “Even rent deep in the hood is pricey.”
Political Overtones as Elections Loom
Many of the cost-of-living issues distressing Pennsylvania families are structural, existing for years before the pandemic. And some research papers have buttressed the notion among some economists that much of inflation was induced by pandemic-driven supply shocks, not government overspending, as others have argued.
None of that may matter for political incumbents looking to defend their records to a frustrated public.
The connection between Biden-era relief programs, resurgent businesses and the speedy return to low unemployment — enabling workers to leave for a better job, or win better pay — seems abstract to many. Sticker shock in a store aisle is straightforward.
The Federal Reserve may still lower interest rates this year, which could improve housing affordability and economic sentiment, as well as President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects. Regardless of rate moves, though, a range of economists expect the national mood to slowly improve as people get used to new prices and achieve more raises outpacing inflation.
For Danella, the server at Levity Brewing in Altoona, compared with “the last four years,” this early spring has had a different feel about it — “like some cycle is ending,” she said.
“I think we all just got to get our footing a little bit,” she added. “I think luck is turning around for a lot of people, and I think we all deserve that.”
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