Good evening. In between the big monthly jobs report, we get weekly numbers on who’s filing for unemployment benefits. First-time applications are a good proxy for layoffs, and this week that number fell a bit to 226,000.

The overall employment rate is at a very decent 4.3%, but many of those job seekers feel really stuck, and in today’s newsletter we’ll look into why. Plus we’ll wrap up a short week for markets and look at why $4 is the magic number for gas prices. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

P.S. Markets are closed tomorrow for Juneteenth and this newsletter will be off, too. You can still find Marketplace on your radio and podcast apps, and we’ll still send our weekly newsletter tomorrow morning as usual. Sign up and we’ll include some recommended listening for the holiday weekend.

The vibe of this job market really depends on where you live and what you do for a living. The numbers can look good even when the job hunting feels bad.

“Two things can be true at once,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed. “Job gains have been picking up … and it's a really tough time to be a job seeker.”

Ullrich called the job market “paralyzed.” Because unemployment may be low, but so is hiring — which doesn’t feel great if you’re trying to get hired.

“There were a couple times this year where the hires rate was as low as it was in April 2020, so think about that — like, who was hiring in April 2020?” she said.

On the other hand, the market feels alright if you do have a job right now, because chances are good you aren’t going to lose it.

“Perhaps the one lesson is, if you're in a job and you even like it a little, maybe stay put for now,” said Michael Goldberg, a professor in the School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

His job-seeking students are victims of a really uncertain job market. “Perhaps the most uncertain I've seen in my career,” he said.

Another reason the market feels worse than the numbers suggest is they don’t tell the whole story, said Michele Evermore with the national employment law project.

“Initial claims doesn't measure how many people are unemployed, it measures how many people are unemployed and are able to get an unemployment benefit,” she said.

So if a person, say, quit to care for an aging parent, or didn’t bother to sign up for unemployment benefits because it was too difficult or too low to seem worth it, they’re not counted in the report.

But some regions are painting a rosier picture. The unemployment rate in Ohio is 14% lower than the national average.

“We talk to employers every single day … and everyone has that same challenge of, ‘I can't find enough people,” said Baiju Shah, president of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, a regional chamber of commerce.

“People have been leaving the Midwest for decades, and now there’s a bunch of new economic growth there, the job market’s just a bit less frozen,” he said.

Shah said Ohio companies are sending recruiters to other states, “that they feel are rich in talent, but have maybe a more challenging … cost of living.”

Workers are buying what they’re selling. Ohio’s Department of Development reported that more people moved to Ohio last year than any time in the past 25 years.

Romero was back on the job hunt this spring, after retiring from an operations role nearly two decades ago. She’s not alone; more than a third of Americans don’t think they’ll have enough saved for retirement. Romero told us how she ended up back in the labor market

Americans are likely to celebrate gas below $4 (depending on where they live), but the price at the pump is still about a buck higher than it was before the U.S. attacked Iran in February, and substantially higher than last summer. Groceries are more expensive too, and they’ll stay that way even after the conflict ends.

The Washington Post knit all that data together this week to show what filling up is actually costing you. You plug in how much gas you buy a month and where you live, then the Post will tell you exactly how much food you could have bought with the price difference in February. Here’s a gift link.