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Originally Posted by 3rd&Brown
Any company leaving the city is unfortunate, and I'm the first to bash the city's tax code...but I also see this as a case of old vs new. These are old line traditional companies without a lot of growth prospects. They're also likely run by old men who still think in old ways. They're not concerned about recruiting the best and brightest young people because young people don't want to work for them. Mostly, they're just re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic and trying to pump up earnings any way they can.
They'll be replaced by more dynamic upstarts that know where you plant your flag is just as important as how you run your company.
Sunoco won't be around in 25 years.
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I look at last decade as very rough for Philadelphia commerce as a whole. Never have I seen a city lose that many companies. Even during the Wall Street crash of 1987, many companies preferred to stay in NYC and even today, you don't hear of any company based in Chicago wanting to leave despite negative news about the city plus the everyday violence in that city. Heck, Pittsburgh still has more Fortune 500 companies than Phila at this moment.
I don't think it's really related to old vs new, but it's just that the business tax situation is awful over here plus the city and state for some strange reason doesn't know how to attract and retain companies, let alone people, from moving here. I still feel that the "Sixth Borough" designation that we've been hearing may be a reality and I wouldn't be surprised if NYC and Philadelphia combined into one huge CSA (which I'm against), but anything's possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Londonee
Sunoco has been run into the ground and is basically an irrelevant retail company at this point. A dramatic fall from the old boys club and the glory days of Sun Oil. Not a big loss. Crown Holdings is just not a city business, it never was. Lincoln Financial still has a huge presence in Center City - the HQ is where the CEO works and was moved literally to be near the CEO's house on the Main Line. Again, not a huge loss.
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I still think that it's nice the the city of Philadelphia can retain a good number of Fortune 500 companies here to help with the tax base. I'm not sure who's gonna be the next startup to be a Fortune 500 company but after losing so many bank HQs (PSFS, CoreStates, Santander), and seeing other companies getting acquired (Pepboys and Rohm & Haas), I'm not sure if Philadelphia can continue to be the corporate center it once was.