From railroads to manufacturers to energy producers, businesses say they are facing a protracted slowdown in production, sales and employment that will spill into next year. Some of them say they are already experiencing a downturn.
You look at where you can afford to open restaurants. We have one restaurant in Seattle, and we probably won’t be expanding there. That’s true of San Francisco and Los Angeles, too. One of the unintended consequences of rising minimum wages is youth unemployment. Almost 40% of our team members are under age 21. When you start paying $15 an hour, are you going to take a chance on a 17-year-old who’s never had a job before when you can find someone with more experience? . . . We are testing server hand-held devices for order-taking in 30 restaurants now, and we’ll roll them out to another 30 in the next month and another 30 by the end of the year. Servers like it because they can take on more tables and earn more tips. Eventually we’ll have tablets where guests can place their own order from the table and pay for it.
California’s historic drought is forcing farmers in the dominant produce-growing state to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres and spend millions of dollars to access water. Yet U.S. grocery shoppers are barely feeling an impact. . . The lack of pain in the produce aisle highlights a tough reality of the produce business: It is difficult for growers and packers to boost prices because the sector is so fragmented, giving retailers and other wholesale buyers many options.
The Labor Department only classifies people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work. All those who don’t have a job and aren’t looking are lumped together under the fishy-sounding classification “not in the labor force.” The share of Americans not in the labor force has been climbing for nearly 15 years, a development that even many economists and demographers failed to anticipate.
Home builders are facing delays and rising costs as they struggle to find enough construction workers.
Those exporters have suffered this year as China’s economy has cooled. In September, the Port of Long Beach, Calif., part of the country’s busiest ocean-shipping gateway, handled 197,076 outbound empty boxes. They accounted for nearly a third of all containers that moved through the port last month. September was the eighth straight month in which empty containers leaving Long Beach outnumbered those loaded with exports.
California producers, who pump about a fifth of the nation’s milk supply, say they’re struggling to maintain output as they weather a precipitous slump in the global dairy market and grapple with rising feed costs stemming from yearslong drought. Their travails are prompting at least one large milk processor—California Dairies Inc., a cooperative with nearly $5 billion in annual sales—to limit investments in milk-handling capacity.
U.S. employment growth slowed in August but the jobless rate fell to the lowest level since 2008, a mixed labor-market reading that leaves the Federal Reserve with a challenging decision on whether to raise short-term rates at its September meeting.
Molycorp Inc., the only U.S. producer of rare earths, intends to mothball its mine in California, laying off almost 500 workers and suspending the country’s sole source of the 15 elements used in magnets, batteries and other high-tech products.
Solar power has gotten so cheap to produce—and so competitively priced in the electricity market—that it is taking hold even in a state that, unlike California, doesn’t offer incentives to utilities to buy or build sun-powered generation.
Signs of a sharp slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy have unnerved investors since Beijing surprised markets last week by devaluing its currency. Shares in the U.S., Asia and Europe have tumbled along with commodity prices as investors worry about waning Chinese demand.
It is the nature of recessions that the bigger they are, the bigger the comeback, yet the period since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has seen the weakest U.S. recovery since World War II. The little improvement we have seen hasn’t benefited a significant percentage of Americans. It is also the nature of recessions that they occur about every eight years; America is ill-prepared to weather the one on the horizon.
Growth worries rattled stock markets from China to Germany and the U.S., with the Dow industrials sliding to their lowest finish of the year.
Rising housing costs are propping up inflation for consumers, despite relief at the gasoline pump and mild price increases for many goods.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed rules aimed at cutting methane emissions from oil and gas production by requiring energy companies to install new technologies at future wells.