Sears shakes down Illinois for corporate welfare
Nice employment base you go there, Gov. Quinn. Shame if anything should happen to it. But we can protect you for a modest, multimillion-dollar consideration.
Give me a break. Six thousand Sears employees are going to move to North Carolina? Call their bluff, governor.
Hoffman Estates-based Sears reportedly has been in discussions with North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and New Jersey to move there. The news was first reported in the Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald newspaper.
"We do owe it to our associates and shareholders to consider options and alternatives and intend to be very thoughtful and thorough in our deliberations," a Sears spokesman told the Daily Herald. "It is still very early in the process."
Sears has both state and local incentives set to expire in 2012, and the company has commissioned a study to measure the impact a move would have on the approximately 6,000 employees and 9,000 ancillary jobs throughout the suburbs, the Daily Herald says.
Comments
You don't get to be all offended unless you have an alternative solution for a PUBLICALLY HELD company whose overhead is 10% higher, and therefore returns less to it's investors than their competitors. That's your roth IRA mutual fund return--where do you want them to pay taxes??
Posted by: RK | May 10, 2011 10:45 AM
I wonder if this will be the beginning of the "corporate free agent era," where business HQs will just bounce from one state to the next, location determined by whomever offers them the best (temporary) tax breaks.
It will only get more and more possible as telecommuting becomes more common. Perhaps businesses will take steps to save moving costs but simply agreeing to build easily transferable, general-use offices as the standard so they can just exchange leases/deeds with each other as they move.
Posted by: John J. Walters | May 10, 2011 12:18 PM
I don't think North Carolina is unrealistic at all. The nation's largest bank (Bank of America) and one of the nation's largest power companies (Duke Energy) is located there. The I-85 corridor in North Carolina is pretty hot right now.
Posted by: TJ | May 11, 2011 2:05 PM