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 […]
By Jeanna Smialek Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged in their final policy decision of 2023 and forecast that they will cut borrowing costs three times in the coming year, a sign that the central bank is shifting toward the next phase in its fight against rapid inflation. Interest rates are now set to a range […]
By Charlotte LoBuono The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, the nation’s oldest biotech trade association, released its 2023 Industry Snapshot on September 6. The report found that biotech and pharmaceutical companies in Massachusetts added more research and development and biomanufacturing jobs than in most other states in 2022. The biopharma R&D workforce in Massachusetts had a year-over-year growth rate of 8.5% […]
By Justin Lahart Inflation has been cooling, and a big part of why is that rent increases have as well. That is also why inflation is likely to keep going lower in the months ahead. Tuesday’s inflation report from the Labor Department showed that overall consumer prices were up 3.2% from a year earlier in October, while […]
By Greg Ryan Massachusetts is building significantly less housing than it was in the mid-20th century. Not coincidentally, the median home sale price has nearly doubled in the past decade to $600,000, far outpacing income growth. More people are leaving Massachusetts for other states than are moving here. Those problems are what the MBTA Communities zoning […]
