Assorted Links Tuesday

Ikea is responding to evolving shopping patterns by building more, much smaller, stores and converting existing warehouse stores to distribution centers: Furniture giant aims to accelerate expansion with $3.2 billion investment in stores.

Remote work: Is it here to stay?

Wheat prices rise on food-protectionism:

🇨🇳 China's latest economic report card:

☕️ Coffee prices way up on frost risks in Brazil.

How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine affect global food security?

Trust in allergy brands:

After peaking during Covid, the savings of low-wage American workers are dwindling:

New white paper: A new vision for achieving community success, growth and sustainability from the author of Destination Leadership.

10 office market trends emerging as Covid-19 pandemic wanes: Some good, some bad.

Mend it, don't try to end it: Joel Kotkin says sprawl fighters should stop trying to push people and jobs back into cities, and get to work on making suburbia a better place.

How bad could it get for tech stocks? Pretty bad, if history is any indication.

This is very interesting:

I grouped the twenty NAICS industry classifications into four broad categories: 1) Labor/Manufacturing; 2) Commerce/Trade; 3) Knowledge; and 4) Services. Then I gathered the workforce data in 2019 for the 35 largest metros, and saw what their workforce composition – again, a snapshot of the social/cultural makeup of a metro economy – looks like. Here’s what I found (the metros are ordered here by population size):

Venture capitalists are aiming to disrupt fish farming: Forever Oceans says it’s built technology that allows it to push into new frontiers for cultivated fish.

Outdoor enthusiasts who retire to rural areas lift local economies and boost populations: The populations of 162 rural counties rose by an average 13% in the past decade, far outstripping the overall U.S. growth rate of 7.4%. About 18.5% of new arrivals in the group’s median county were ages 55 or older, a gray wave that helped stem the overall population loss in rural America, where births barely exceeded deaths from 2010 to 2020.

From the International Trade Administration: Why your business should go on an international trade mission. (Of course they would say that.)