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Gainfully employed: Big business means more green to go around
By Andrew Snyder, asnyder@starlocalnews.com
The first step to supporting local businesses is gathering some spending money, and even the largest of corporations can help with that.
Salaries paid out by national corporations land in local pockets on their way to local stores, and several of those companies have carved out an even greater connection to the community by headquartering in area employment centers like Plano. The city is home to 14 companies that employ 1,000 or more people and is the corporate headquarters of Frito-Lay and J.C. Penney.
The cities top employers include Bank of America Home Loans (5,400 employees), HP Enterprise Services (4,800), Capital One (3,175), J.C. Penney (3,100), Ericsson (2,650), Alcatel-Lucent (2,500), Frito-Lay (2,400), Dell Services (2,200), Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (1,670) and Medical Center of Plano (1,300).
The city also has a workforce of 300,000 within a 30-mile area. The Metroplex as a whole includes 3.3 million workers, and that number is growing.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows employment in the Dallas-Plano-Irving metropolitan area has risen steadily this year. The October employment figures shows there were 2,090,800 people employed in the area, compared to 2,034,129 employees a year ago.
The attraction between big business and Plano has helped make the city one of the wealthiest in the area, with a median household income of $82,901 between the years of 2007 to 2011 compared to the state average of $50,920.
Along with supplying residents with a salary, large employers also bring in outside customers during working hours to frequent shops and restaurants.
"They mainly bring more daytime population to our city, which helps our retail businesses and ultimately local sales tax revenue to the city," said Cindi Lane, economic development specialist with The Colony. "For our local residents who work there, they have less of a commute which saves on gas and time away from home."
Money not spent on gas can be redirected elsewhere.
Many area cities include school districts and local government among their top employers. Lewisville ISD (690) and the city government (387) are the top employers in the The Colony, followed by Walmart (357), Hawaiian Falls (200), Home Depot (112), Edward Don and Company (105), Austin Ranch (93), Texas Roadhouse (90), Kroger (70) and The Tribute (60).
Little Elm ISD employs more than three times as many workers (751) as any other organization or business in Little Elm. Kroger follows (225), along with the Town of Little Elm (191), Retractable Technologies (150), Lowe's (136) and Applebee's (100).
Still-developing communities like McKinney rely on a few top employers and a collection of businesses with smaller reach. The city's top employer is Raytheon (3,600), which has a work force three times that of the next highest, Medical Center of McKinney (1,071). The drop-off between the next five in line is similar, if not as significant: Encore Wire (1,050), Torchmark / United American Insurance (860), Baylor Medical Center of McKinney (575), Timber Blinds (500) and Watson & Chalin Manufacturing (240).
Baylor Medical Center opened in July and is already among the city's biggest employers. In another example of the connection between a community and its job providers, the hospital is designed to grow along with McKinney. Currently a 95-bed operation, the hospital could eventually grow to become a 400-bed facility.
That growth means more quality jobs for a more vibrant local economy.
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