Besides the big three, plenty of other Fortune 500 companies power WA economy
By Jon Talton
Seattle Times
SEATTLE – The corporate base of the Puget Sound region can be seen as shaped by Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon. But the foundation of the economy here is wider and deeper.
In the most recent Fortune 500, the metropolitan area posted 17 corporations headquartered here. Among them are familiar names: Amazon (No. 2), Costco Wholesale (No. 11), Microsoft (No. 13) and Starbucks (No. 116).
Fortune’s list showed Seattle’s tally at twice as many as metro Portland, around the same number as metro Denver (where I worked as a business writer for the Rocky Mountain News) and 18 in metro Phoenix (where I was a columnist at The Arizona Republic). Most of Phoenix’s headquarters are in the suburbs and it is the nation’s fifth-most populous city.
Yet Seattle offers some of the biggest business brands in the world. Amazon and Microsoft are two of the world’s five Big Tech outfits. Starbucks, despite its labor troubles, remains a worldwide giant and — as much as many Seattleites despise it — a symbol of the city.
The business environment of this region consists of much more than Big Tech, planes and coffee.
While Issaquah, Washington-based Costco receives ample coverage in The Seattle Times, here are a few more bits of information.
The discount warehouse store was spearheaded by a company called the Price Club in San Diego (which I covered back in the 1980s). Price Club’s former executive Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman founded Costco and opened the first location in 1983 on Fourth Avenue South in Seattle. A decade later, Costco merged with Price Club.
Costco faces ample and tough competition. Among them, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Kroger.
With 316,000 employees in the United States, Canada and other worldwide locations, Costco’s ratio of pay between CEO Ron Vachris and the median employee’s pay for the 2022 fiscal year was 218, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch.
By comparison, Walmart was 993, Target 680 and Kroger 671. Amazon turned in a ratio of 38.
Costco is famous for its good treatment of employees, good benefits and willingness not to fight unionization (the company’s distribution-center drivers recently joined the Teamsters).
Shares in Costco bought for $4 in 1984 were worth around $848 this week.
Paccar, headquartered in Bellevue, is a worldwide truck manufacturer boasting such nameplates as Kenworth and Peterbilt. Less known is that the company began in 1905 and with a merger was named Pacific Car and Foundry. Not only did the firm build trucks, but also railroad cars and the steel for the Space Needle.
In 1972, shareholders adopted the new name. Paccar has about 32,000 employees and operates globally. Paccar recently joined engine-maker Cummins and competitor Daimler to build a $2 billion battery plant in Mississippi, part of Paccar’s jump toward electric trucks.
No. 168 on Fortune’s list is Coupang, an e-commerce platform headquartered in downtown Seattle. Bom Kim, a Korean American entrepreneur, founded the company in 2010. It became the largest online marketplace site in South Korea. In 2022, the headquarters was relocated here from Seoul.
This is another example of how the extensive tech talent attracted by Amazon and Microsoft contributes to the region’s drawing power.
At No. 286 is hometown hero Nordstrom. As my former colleague Renata Geraldo reported, the company intends to open 22 Nordstrom Rack locations as the discount brand’s earnings sprinted ahead of its namesake department stores. An attempt to take the company private has gone nowhere, although the private equity outfit Sycamore Partners has expressed interest in helping the Nordstrom family make it happen.
Expedia Group, the travel company headquartered on Elliott Bay, comes in at No. 315 on Fortune’s list. This past February, it announced cuts of 1,500 under new chief executive Ariane Gorin amid a restructuring.
At No. 385 is Alaska Air Group.
The company, which comprises Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air, is that rarest of creatures in a highly consolidated industry: a survivor. With its unique network of service to the 49th state, Alaska has proved difficult to acquire.
As a result, it hasn’t fallen the way of so many beloved airlines, such as Western, TWA, Piedmont and Pacific Southwest. Today, Alaska is the fifth-largest airline in North America and its financial situation is strong.
A stalwart of the Pacific Northwest is Weyerhaeuser, which clocks in at No. 476 on the Fortune 500 list. Headquartered in Pioneer Square, the company was founded in 1900 by Frederick Weyerhaeuser. Harvesting trees in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, the company was the Microsoft of the first decades of the 20th century. A great deal of Weyerhaeuser wealth is spread across the region.
To be sure, Weyerhaeuser has faced criticism from environmentalists and federal regulators over such practices as clear-cutting forests. It stumbled in the Great Recession with its real estate arm. Recently, Weyerhaeuser cast itself as an environmental friend, with its timber lands absorbing greenhouse emissions that are drivers of human-caused climate change. Not all critics are satisfied.
Our diverse accumulation of businesses headquartered here has been good for the entire state.
According to the Washington State Department of Commerce, the state is home to more than 1,500 aerospace-related suppliers and vendors, thanks to Boeing’s presence. Along with Airbus’ home in Toulouse, France, the Puget Sound region is the largest aerospace center on the planet.
Metropolitan Seattle remains among the nation’s leading cities for startups, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence and climate tech. Biotech and biomedical outfits keep sprouting. We continue to attract and hold high-end outposts of Silicon Valley firms.
Seattle still faces enormous challenges. Although in June downtown saw the largest number of workers since March 2020, it’s still well below the prepandemic numbers. Homelessness and quality-of-life issues remain.
But the economy is strong. In June, the most recent month for which data is available, Washington’s unemployment rate was 4.9%. It was 4.3% for Seattle-Bellevue-Everett. Economists consider this close to “full employment.”
That’s not much comfort for the unemployed, but other cities envy our ability to attract talent, capital and strong companies.