This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list. In total, Fortune 500 companies represent two-thirds of the U.S. GDP with $12 trillion in revenues, $890 billion in profits, $19 trillion in market value, and employ 28.2 million people worldwide.
Amazon.com today announced plans to open a fulfillment center in Fresno that will employ up to 2,500 people.
The 855,000 square-foot facility will be located in a burgeoning business zone at Orange and Central avenues — about 1,000 acres that is being primed for e-commerce and data center jobs, said Mayor Lee Brand in an interview. Brand said there has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work getting the $100 million project permitted, and he expects a groundbreaking within 30 days, and about one year to build the center — putting an opening in the second half of 2018.
The Castroville manufacturing and distribution center will officially close July 3, 2017, and all 183 employees will be laid off. Keurig has owned the warehouse since 2010.
Chinese citizens, companies, and capital have arrived on U.S. soil in force, and they’re making their impact felt across small towns, college campuses, and corporate America. The trend is national, but the epicenter is in California. As the top destination for Chinese investors, students, tourists, and homebuyers, California is the living laboratory for a new paradigm in U.S.-China relations. This new paradigm is built on grassroots ties and face-to-face interactions. I call it Chinafornia.
During the latest expansion, new establishments have accounted for a little more than 11% of all new private-sector jobs created in the U.S. During the 1990s, the figure was 15%, according to Labor Department data released Wednesday.
That may seem a small shift, but those few percentage points add up to nearly 300,000 jobs a quarter. Separate data from the Commerce Department show the trend goes back even further. The share of private firms less than a year old has dropped from more than 12% during much of the 1980s to only about 8% since 2010.
Once known for casinos and brothels, Reno is now attracting corporations drawn by its low costs, lenient permitting rules and relative proximity to Silicon Valley. Other big corporations that have recently built data centers, factories and distribution centers at the industrial park include Apple Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and eBay Inc.
Since October, about 89,000 workers in general merchandise stores have lost their jobs, which is more than the number of people employed in the entire US coal industry, The New York Times reported. . . The retail industry, which employs about one out of every 10 American workers, typically pays low wages but provides employment to people in every age bracket, as well as those who are low-skilled and need flexible scheduling options.
So when these workers lose their jobs, they can have a hard time finding other employment.
The profound reordering of New York’s shopping scene reflects a broad restructuring in the American retail industry.
E-commerce players, led by the industry giant Amazon, have made it so easy and fast for people to shop online that traditional retailers, shackled by fading real estate and a culture of selling in stores, are struggling to compete. This shift has been building gradually for years. But economists, retail workers and real estate investors say it appears that it has sped up in recent months.
Between 2010 and 2014, e-commerce grew by an average of $30 billion annually. Over the past three years, average annual growth has increased to $40 billion.
A Pennsylvania call center operator plans to lay off 135 nonunion workers at its office in North Highlands. In mid-2012, ACT announced the opening of the North Highlands calls center, with an initial 500 employees and announced expectations of filling as many as 2,000 jobs.
Rancho Cordova’s role as a hub of the aerospace industry will soon end. Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc. Monday said it will eliminate 1,100 of its 1,400 local jobs over the next two and a half years, and will shut down manufacturing operations. Aerojet Rocketdyne said plans to consolidate its California-based Sacramento and Vernon operations and Gainesville, Va., sites while centralizing and expanding its existing presence in Huntsville, Ala. with a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.
The U.S. has long held itself out as a nation driven by entrepreneurs and small businesses. Presidents and politicians still invoke that image, and for generations, it was largely accurate. Today, the U.S. has become something different: a nation of employees working for large companies, often very large ones, Theo Francis writes. Huge companies dominate American economic life well beyond employment. They ring up a disproportionate share of sales for goods and services, both to consumers and to other businesses.
However, all those perks come with a price and Bay Area cities have become some of the most expensive places to live in the country. Foster thinks many people would like to leave the area in search of a better quality of life, but don’t want to sacrifice potential career opportunities. . . To combat the problem, Zapier, a workflow automation startup that helps users to connect apps, is offering $10,000 to Bay Area residents who accept a position with the company and agree to move away. All of the company’s employees work remotely.
Xero, a company that makes accounting software for small businesses, this month moved its U.S. headquarters from San Francisco to Denver. . . chief executive Rod Drury expects that will expand to ‘a few hundred’ as he tries to build a mass of people in a more affordable city than San Francisco, where its U.S. leadership team has previously been based. Drury said San Francisco was a ‘great place to get started’ and the first port of call to raise capital, but as the company moves into an ‘operational phase’ he had to weigh up whether to stay in that city or move.”
New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas are home to half of new business startups—and Americans are increasingly unwilling to move to such hotspots for the jobs they are spawning. At no time in recent history has entrepreneurship been so heavily concentrated in a handful of big cities, according to a bipartisan team of economic policy advisers at the Washington research and policy shop.
The company’s current U.S. headquarters is in Glendale, Calif., where it has come under fire in recent years for bottling water during the state’s record multi-year drought. In 2015, Nestlé — which has nine brands of water, including Arrowhead — removed 36 million gallons of water from a natural forest in California to bottle and sell, prompting public criticism and at least one lawsuit.