| Google Maps is too slow for Shippensburg. In satellite photos of Exit 24, off Interstate 81 in central Pennsylvania, a brick and limestone house still stands on White Church Road, as does the silo, barns and the rest of the 102-acre farm. What's also there now: a 1.8-million-square-foot Walmart fulfillment center where some 500 people work. Next to it are four more warehouses and a Sheetz gas station. As online shopping exploded over the past decade, retailers and consumer goods makers have moved to upgrade their supply chains. They've wanted central locations to receive and store products near populated areas and connected to major transportation networks. Shippensburg is that hub for much of the Northeast.  A view of I-81 is seen in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. Photographer: Michelle Gustafson for Bloomberg Businessweek More than 170 million square feet of warehouse space has been built in Pennsylvania along two major interstates since 2014, double the office space in the entire city of San Francisco. This dynamic has transformed Shippensburg and a half-dozen neighboring towns from an agrarian idyll into a warehousing and distribution megaregion. A generation ago, there were essentially three career paths in the area: farming, the military and manufacturing. They've all been overtaken by the warehouse boom. Nationwide, employment in warehousing and storage tripled from 2010 to 2022, to 1.9 million employees. There's so much demand that two years ago, the university began offering an online master's degree in supply chain analytics. - The Big Take: First there was "shrinkflation." Now, consumers are confronting "upflation" — a new retail tactic pushing Americans to pay more.
Additional Reading: | 
No comments:
Post a Comment