Three years ago, the U.S. economy went through an unprecedented upheaval as millions of workers left low-paying jobs for more promising ones. At the same time, many white-collar workers cemented themselves into remote, or at least hybrid, positions that gave them more flexibility.

It was called The Great Resignation.

Fast-forward to today, and the situation looks like a mirror image, economists say. Specifically, on average, few workers are leaving their jobs, though they still do not face the prospect of imminent layoffs.

At the same time, the rate of hiring has dropped significantly. Some economists have begun calling it ‘The Great Stay.’

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to report slower but still steady job growth of 198,000 for February, compared with 353,000 in January.

But the solid job growth data, combined with an unemployment rate that, at 3.7%, is usually a sign of a healthy labor market, is colliding with other, more worrisome trends.

“We’re seeing that the job market is getting cooler,” said Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a labor research group. “It’s still not a bad one, but it’s looking more like what we saw in the mid 2010s — which was not a terrible job market but still a worse one than what we saw later that decade or what we had in the post-pandemic period.” 

The labor market faces an unusual set of cross-currents that makes it hard to predict whether the economy can maintain its strength in the medium term and beyond, said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

In addition to quits being down, he noted that hours worked have, in some instances, been cut back to recessionary levels. On Thursday, the BLS reported a 3.3% decrease in hours worked for manufacturing — the largest such decline since the historic drop-off in the second quarter of 2020.

Cuts among temporary jobs have also picked up, Zandi said, which can often signal that cuts to full-time positions are in the offing.

‘It feels fragile,’ he said.

At the same time — and despite some high-profile headlines reflecting thousands of roles eliminated over the past year — actual layoff rates remain below pre-pandemic levels.

Yet here, too, there are worsening signs. The job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas on Thursday reported the highest level of layoff announcements for any February since the global financial crisis.

“As we navigate the start of 2024, we’re witnessing a persistent wave of layoffs,” Andrew Challenger, the firm’s labor and workplace expert, said in a statement. “Businesses are aggressively slashing costs and embracing technological innovations, actions that are significantly reshaping staffing needs.”

Zandi noted that firms’ profit margins are starting to decline amid higher interest-rate costs, which could put further pressure on their payrolls.

In general, he said, ‘the market just feels like it’s all over the place.’

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a job, it appears to be taking longer to find a new one. BLS data shows the number of people experiencing unemployment for 15 to 26 weeks has climbed 53% since it hit a low in March 2022.

“If someone needs to find a new job or wants to find a better job, the opportunities right now are more limited, aside from a few fairly narrow sectors,” Berger said.

The industries doing the most hiring include health care and social services, which are expanding thanks to the aging population, and government services, whose offers of lower salaries, on average, are increasingly seen as competitive given the relative lack of other new opportunities elsewhere in the private sector, Berger said.

Given the still low rate of layoffs in the broader economy, Berger is optimistic that The Great Stay can be sustained. An example of a firm holding its headcount steady is Amazon, which has trimmed payrolls from post-pandemic highs, but which remain significantly above pre-pandemic levels.

“We are investing, and we are adding in some areas,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call with reporters following the company’s quarterly results. “But there’s a general feeling in most teams that we’re looking to hold the line on headcount, perhaps go down as we can drive efficiencies.”

There remains reason for some optimism. Job openings remain well above pre-pandemic levels. In a follow-up interview, Andrew Challenger pointed out that the U.S. has had three consecutive months of net new job growth, including a 12-month high of 353,000 jobs added in January.

‘It’s still a very good labor market,’ Challenger said. ‘There are certainly companies that want to keep people; people are staying. But there’s also increased layoff activity. They don’t have to be correlated — sometimes it’s just volatility.’

Yet, in February, employers announced plans to hire just 10,317 workers, for a total of 15,693 so far in 2024, the lowest year-to-date total for announced hiring plans since Challenger began its tracking in 2009, the company found.

The broader picture remains an unusual one, Berger said.

‘There are relatively few new people coming in, but relatively few people are leaving,’ he said. ‘It’s a weird environment.’

Grocery giant Aldi plans to add 800 new stores in the U.S. over the next five years.

The German-owned, Illinois-based chain said in a release Thursday it is planning to build or expand hundreds of Aldi locations in the company’s preexisting northeast and midwest strongholds, as well as in western U.S. and Southern California. A first Las Vegas location is planned, too.

Meanwhile, in the southeast, the company will convert many existing Winn-Dixies and Harveys locations into Aldis, though ‘a meaningful’ number of them will remain under their current brands. Aldi said Thursday its acquisition of Southeastern Grocers, the parent company of Winn-Dixie and Harveys, had been completed.

Aldi said it anticipates that approximately 50 stores will begin the conversion process in the latter half of 2024, with the majority of these stores reopening as Aldi in 2025.

“Our growth is fueled by our customers, and they are asking for more Aldi stores in their neighborhoods nationwide,” said Aldi chief executive Jason Hart in the statement. He continued: ‘With this commitment to add 800 stores in the next five years, we’ll be where our shoppers need us while positively impacting the communities we serve.’

According to SupermarketNews.com, Aldi was the 13th largest U.S. grocer as of last summer — only slightly larger than Dollar General in terms of market share — but currently ranks as the fastest-growing grocery retailer in the U.S.

Known for its lower prices via private-label selections, Aldi’s ambitious growth plans represent a viable threat to established players — especially in Southeastern markets like Florida, according to a report from the market research group Dunnhumby.

“Retailers everywhere should be examining their private brand, pricing, assortment, digital, and real estate strategies in response to Aldi’s move, to build protective moats for an uncertain future,” a report on Aldi from last summer said according to GroceryDive.com.

Texan Dixie Warden is quick to say she’s “not a numbers girl.” But as the first user of the government’s new free electronic tax return filing system, Warden reports she completed her taxes this year in about an hour using the program.

“I don’t want to call myself a dummy, but this is taxes for dummies right here,” Warden said. The program asked her simple questions about her tax status, provided definitions for tax lingo such as adjusted gross income and a chatbot was on hand to answer her questions.

The project, known as Direct File and launched by the IRS on a limited basis in 12 states this tax season, is in its pilot phase. Starting this week, it is available for eligible users to start their returns at any time after earlier being available only during certain hours.

If it is successful and scaled up for the general public’s use, the program could drastically change how Americans file their taxes and how much money they spend completing them. That is, if the agency can see the program through its development in spite of threats to its funding.

Warden, a 37-year-old IRS employee from Kyle, Texas, says she saved nearly $400 this tax season by filing her tax return directly to the government from her home laptop instead of paying one of the commercial tax prep services used by millions of people. Individual taxpayers pay an average of $140 preparing their tax returns each year.

Warden has worked for the IRS in a variety of roles for the past 16 years, but she is not a tax expert. She’s currently a human relations specialist.

“The way that it was laid out was just so darn easy to understand and I just see it being helpful for so many millions of people,” she said.

While Warden’s praise of the program might seem natural given her employer, a broader test is under way now as people around the country give it a try.

The IRS began its pilot program in fits and starts in 12 states, around timed windows, for people who have very simple W-2s, an employee’s wage and tax statement.

The agency estimates that hundreds of thousands of mostly lower-income taxpayers will participate in the program during the 2024 filing season.

The slow introduction is in part meant to avoid a repeat of the disastrous rollout of the Obama administration’s health insurance program under the Affordable Care Act in 2013, which was rife with website crashes and glitches.

The IRS initially invited government workers to use the program and Warden was the very first. Now members of the public are starting to participate.

Derek Wheeler, director of the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic at the University of Florida’s Law School, said his clinic has referred less than a dozen clients to the Direct File system. Florida is one of the 12 states participating in the pilot. So are New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York.

“The benefit of a program like this, that is simple for users, is immense,” Wheeler told The Associated Press.

His legal clinic has partnered with the IRS and selectively identifies clients who may be eligible to submit their taxes through the program.

The IRS faces intense blowback from private tax preparation companies that have made billions from charging people to use their software and have spent millions lobbying Congress on the issue.

One of their biggest criticisms is that free tax prep services already exist for people of all income brackets and developing the Direct File system will end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

Several organizations offer free online tax preparation assistance to taxpayers under certain income limits. Also, fillable forms are available online on the IRS website, but the forms are complicated and taxpayers still have to calculate their tax liability.

A Government Accountability Office report from April 2022 found that while 70% of taxpayers were eligible for the IRS’s existing free-filing program, only 3% of taxpayers actually use the service.

Critics include Grover Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, who says the agency is “better off not wasting taxpayer money on Direct File” and should promote the programs that are already available. He also argues the IRS did not receive explicit authority from Congress to create the program.

The IRS was tasked with looking into how to create a “direct file” system as part of the money it received from the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. It gave the IRS nine months and $15 million to report on how such a program would work.

The IRS published its feasibility report last May and estimated that annual costs for new program would range from $64 million for 5 million users to $249 million for 25 million users.

“They didn’t get the authorization for the pilot program and Congress has said, ‘Nobody authorized this. This is a violation of the law,’” Norquist said.

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel insisted during a recent House hearing that the agency has both “a responsibility and an authority to offer taxpayers different approaches for how to meet their tax obligation.”

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, says free-filing tax options in the United States do not measure up to what other nations offer their citizens. For instance, Germany, Japan, Britain and other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries all offer taxpayers some form of pre-populated tax document to approve, sign and return.

“This is not a problem we have solved yet,” she said. “The U.S. does have a markedly complex income tax system, but it’s very clear that if this could be done in other countries it’s something that should be done here.”

Wheeler, at the University of Florida, adds that “having as many options as possible for people to file their taxes is important and brings us closer to other countries that send their taxpayers pre-populated forms.”

“We may never get to that point, but this is a start.”

For the program to continue to grow, it will need continued funding under the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $80 billion for the IRS.

House Republicans are trying to claw back some of the money. They built a $1.4 billion reduction to the IRS into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress last summer. A separate agreement will take an additional $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years to divert to other nondefense programs.

Warden says she hopes she’ll be able to use the program again next tax season, and that it will be expanded for others.

“I never had the confidence to do my own taxes,” she said. But after using Direct File, she said, “I feel foolish for paying all that money every year.”

An iconic American sausage maker is about to offer a meat-free option.

Oscar Mayer announced Wednesday the launch of plant-based NotHotDogs and NotSausages.

It’s a joint venture between Oscar Mayer parent Kraft Heinz and TheNotCompany, a Chile-based food-tech company backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The venture is called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, stylized as TheKraftHeinzNotCo.

‘Oscar Mayer NotHotDogs and NotSausages offer the savory and smoky experience that brand fans have known and loved for more than 140 years,’ the brand said in a release.

An analysis cited by Kraft forecasts the meat-alternative market to more than double by 2030. However, many meatless hot dogs and dinner sausages currently on offer have failed to capture consumers because of flavor and texture concerns, Kraft said.

“We know people are hungry for plant-based meat options from brands they know and trust,” Lucho Lopez-May, the CEO of The Kraft Heinz Not Company, said in a release. “In launching the joint venture’s first product in the plant-based meat category, we saw an opportunity to satisfy these consumer cravings, leveraging NotCo’s revolutionary AI technology and the power, equity, and legacy of the Oscar Mayer brand.”

In addition to a traditional hot dog, flavors on offer from the new lineup include bratwurst and Italian sausage. The new products may contain less saturated fat and cholesterol than traditional Oscar Mayer beef products, but they may contain more sodium, as well as more protein. 

In a follow-up statement to NBC News, the company said ingredients included in the new product lineup include bamboo fiber, mushroom, pea protein and acerola cherry, also known as Barbados cherry or West Indian cherry.

Kraft Heinz and NotCo have already launched plant-based cheese slices, mayo, and mac & cheese products.