By Micheline Maynard Five years ago, Whole Foods quietly tested an idea. The massively popular grocer rolled out a smaller-sized store, something along the lines of a New York City bodega — the kind of corner markets that sell everything from breakfast sandwiches to yogurt and paper towels. Turns out, customers liked the concept. But then […]
By Aaron Pressman Amazon unveiled its largest facility in Massachusetts on Monday, a staggering five-story warehouse in North Andover with almost 4 million square feet of space to hold everything from books and DVDs to cans of soup. The fulfillment center on the site of a former telephone company factory cost about $400 million to […]
By Lydia DePillis If the economy is slowing down, nobody told the labor market. Employers added 275,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, in another month that exceeded expectations. It was the third straight month of gains above 200,000, and the 38th consecutive month of growth — fresh evidence that after surging back […]
By Rachel Siegel, Lauren Kaori Gurley and Meryl Kornfield Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economicrebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world. That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born […]
By Marian Zboraj Sprouts Farmers Market Inc. has high expectations for 2024. Amid the release of its impressive results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ending Dec. 31, results, the specialty grocer released its outlook for the year. The outlook includes net sales growth of 5.5% to 7.5%, comparable-store sales growth of 1.5% to […]
By Trefor Moss Many malls are struggling but IKEA is betting it can breathe new life into the troubled format. Ingka Group, the operator of most of the world’s IKEA stores, has assembled its own mall empire in recent years, spanning from China to Europe to the U.S., and says it wants to buy more locations […]
By NEREJ Somerville, MA According to Rafi Properties, owner and operator of Somernova, the 7.4-acre innovation campus and community dedicated to helping people and companies iterate and grow faster, Sublime Systems (Sublime) will expand their headquarters on the campus. Sublime, the leading developer of a fossil-fuel-free, scalable, drop-in replacement for traditional cement in concrete, will add […]
By Justin Lahart By one measure inflation is closing in on the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. By another it is still far away. Whether, and how, that gap closes could be critical to Fed plans this year. The Labor Department’s monthly report on consumer prices, known as the consumer-price index or CPI, is generally thought of as […]
By Jeanna Smialek Federal Reserve officials held interest rates at their highest level in more than two decades at their first meeting of 2024 and hinted that their next move will be to lower borrowing costs — even as policymakers made clear they are not yet ready to make that cut. Jerome H. Powell, the […]
by Carol Todreas Placemaking. That is the word for 2024. While the concept has historical precedence in urban development, it became part of our current culture in the 1960’s when urbanists started to think about cities for people, not just cars. Since then and particularly now with the abundance of retail on the internet, physical […]
