Journal Community

As unemployment has risen, businesses have felt the pain. So many restaurants have closed in recent months that the Portland alternative newspaper Willamette Week recently started a column called "Restaurant Apocalypse" to keep track of closings. "Everybody is holding on to their money," says Ryan Birkland, a Portland artist who does abstract paintings of flowers and koi fish on glass, sheet metal and other recycled materials.

Mr. Birkland sells art across a range of prices, but says sales of $400 to $500 pieces, which are mostly purchased by young professionals, are down about 25% compared with this time last year. The scarcity of jobs has college grads competing for positions they might not have considered just a few years ago. HotLips Pizza, a local institution that touts ingredients from nearby farms and whose owner drives a stubby electric car emblazoned with the restaurant's rouge lips logo,

Recently posted a job for a sous-chef and got hundreds of résumés in the space of a few days. They were both over- and under-qualified, ranging from the executive chef at fine dining restaurants that have closed to unemployed computer technicians with zero experience in a kitchen. "People are having a harder time landing," said Greene Lawson, Hot Lips' chef.Boly: Welch Recruiting, a Portland firm, says it has had several lawyers willing to settle for work as paralegals.

The firm says it generally won't place the lawyers because their over-qualification makes it unlikely they would continue to do paralegal work when the economy turns. Stephen Anderson, 28, a lawyer who moved in June to Portland from Austin, says for now, he's happy being over-qualified. He went too boly: Welch looking for legal or temp work of any kind, and the recruiting firm ended up hiring him to be an assistant to the firm's recruiters, a job that includes answering phones, getting lunches and occasionally walking the owner's two poodles. "I know I'm underemployed and if it bothered me more, I guess I'd do more to change it," he says.