Assorted Links Tuesday
Taco Tuesday: Ikea, remote work, wheat, China, allergy brands, office market trends, and more.
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:
My first economic development “job” was in the early 1990s. I was in college, and my dad, a college administrator, was involved in the recruitment of Mercedes-Benz to Alabama.
— Andy Portera 🚢 (@portera_andy) May 12, 2022
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.)
My dentist’s reception desk is manned by a woman in the Philippines on video.
— Marshall Haas (@marshal) May 17, 2022
When you walk in, an iMac is facing you with her on camera to check you in.
Owner said he struggled with high turnover and bad employees. Philippines woman has been flawless by comparison. pic.twitter.com/hOI0EuZ1IM
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