Archive for July, 2008

Recently a friend of mine was made manager of a struggling Starbucks cafe in southern California that opened in 2006. Given that the corporation announced earlier this week that it is going to close 600 unprofitable stores you can probably guess the rest of the story. Yes, my friend’s store is one of the 600. [...]

The following table shows the population and employment growth and decline in the years 2000 – 2006 in the counties that are included in Metropolitan Boston (what the federal government calls Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH), as well as for the metropolitan area itself. The counties are Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth and Suffolk counties in Massachusetts, and Strafford [...]

News media does a good job of reporting the monthly unemployment rate and change payroll numbers, but isn’t quite as good at highlighting the revised numbers, which can deviate quite a bit from preliminary estimates. For example, the preliminary estimates for change in payroll numbers were as follows for the first six months of 2008 [...]